feminism and rape:
I walked along my university corridor last week and was drawn to a poster on the wall; it consisted of a woman with a beer in her hand looking a little worse for wear. Behind her an aggressive looking male towered above. The caption read: “Are you making yourself vulnerable?”.
(...) In addition, what message is this sending out to men? They are constantly portrayed as would be perpetrators of violence, with supposedly no control over their actions.
(...) Women should dress appropriately, we should be careful about where we leave our drinks. We must make sure we get into a properly licensed cab. What about the actual perpetrators? What is happening to them?
(...) Isn’t it about time that we saw more advertisements and campaigns aimed at the perpetrators of violence and more work done to prevent, predominantly men, growing up assuming they can have this control over women? During 2004/5 there were 13,322 reported rapes of women to the police, two thirds of these don’t go any further than the police stage (www.rapecrisis.org.uk/stats) . The worrying statistics of late is that its estimated for every rape that occurs only 1% are convicted because so little are reported in the first place and of that few only a minority go on to conviction.