@spaceinsomniac said:
Sounds like a shitty police officer and victim blaming to me, not rape culture.
How is that all that different from "You were mugged, huh? Let me get this straight, Sir. You were walking alone at night in THIS neighborhood?"
And let me add that I hope she filed a complaint against the officer in question. :(
What? The phenomenon of victim blaming is one of the core concepts of rape culture, so much so that it's the first thing listed in the definition you quoted in the first post! I'm afraid this statement makes you look like you don't really understand what the entire concept actually means and deals with, which can be a fair misunderstanding because there are definitely more and less extreme definitions. It's akin to saying "sounds like easy access to high-powered automatic firearms to me, not gun culture" in response to an example of a mass shooting. Which, I must emphasize, is not meant to be an argument on that topic but simply an hypothetical illustrative example.
This was undoubtedly a shitty police officer, but a core difference would be that if a suspect in a mugging was actually arrested and taken to court, there would be absolutely no consideration of "this guy was asking to be mugged by being alone in a bad neighborhood", it would be purely about the crime perpetrated, end of story. Nobody would give a shit about what precipitated the mugging. Whereas in the case of a victim of sexual assault, the police/defense/etc. will still frequently ask the victim if they may have "provoked" the perpetrator. That shouldn't be relevant, yet many will still believe it so. It's the difference between "you perhaps made a risky/poor choice, but that doesn't make what happened to you ok" and "you made a poor choice and so you deserve what you get".
It's that godawful prison system "joke" that shlub earlier said and I refuse to quote. It's funny because those people are criminals and deserve it! Why, they might have been selling marijuana!
The concept of "rape culture" isn't just the extreme idea that it makes rapists into rapists, though it could certainly contribute to how some perpetrators might justify it to themselves and thus undertake the act when they otherwise may not have. But in general, that is indeed rather unrealistic if not a bit silly; of course there will probably always be individuals who do terrible things, and we can no more expect to eradicate rape than we can expect to eradicate homicide. But just because we'll never completely stop murder doesn't mean we just stop considering how a culture of violence could lead to people being more prone to commit violent acts.
More moderately, considerations about rape culture are really often more about making the rest of usnon-rapists/sexual assaulters less shitty about how we treat rape and sexual assault so we don't end up contributing, knowingly or otherwise, to a culture that would make a victim ever hesitant to report such a crime or feel guilt for having it occur to them. It's often just about something as innocuous as making you consider that, hey, maybe this thing I was going to say about this person or joke I was going to make might just make people feel bad, so it's probably not a good joke or a good thing to say.
The overwhelming majority of college people know it's wrong and won't ever commit rape, yes, and supposedly they have for decades if not centuries, but that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a shitty attitude about it that's continually lead, year after year, to shit like rapists being found not guilty or not even being prosecuted because the victim was deemed to be "asking for it". Supposedly just as many people know murder is similarly wrong and won't commit it, yet pretty much nobody would ever expect a murderer to be absolved of the crime because the victim was "asking for it" by being somewhere they shouldn't have, say, wearing the wrong gang's colours, would they? I think most in our society would consider these two crimes nearly equally heinous, yet this glaring discrepancy still exists, so clearly there's something in the culture at play here that has allowed it to persist for decades.
Page 3 of the report:
These evaluations should focus on the true end goal, reducing rape, not intermediate goals such as changing attitudes (despite the fact that these intermediate goals are vastly easier to measure).
RAINN isn't saying that "rape culture" doesn't exist and should be forgotten about and ignored, it's saying it is important that when we're considering these things we don't let it overshadow the fact that a rapist is a criminal, responsible for their own actions, and that they need to be dealt with appropriately harshly and justly, because that still isn't happening like it should. It's simply saying that when it comes to instances of actual rape, they believe the way colleges treat it needs to not lose sight of the actual crime, and they should refocus that effort accordingly.
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