Outdated Perspectives

What a new UK study says.

Rape is never an easy topic of discussion, particularly if you consider one in five women and every five out of 100,000 men are raped and when anti-pornography lobbyists bring up the issue that depictions of women in porn are often a cause of criminal sexual behaviour. I'm sure they have their stats available, just like any good lobbyist would, but having once been in the PR world I can say with certainty that stats can be manipulated in a variety of different ways depending on what argument you need them to fill.

The topic of discussion I came across over the weekend was from a new public opinion poll out of the United Kingdom. There was a good-sized sample of over 1000 participants and it was telling about how people in the UK view females that have been raped. You'll excuse my aversion to the term victim, as it's never been a particularly empowering word to me.

The poll, conducted by ICM for Amnesty International didn't really reveal anything I hadn't known before. It gave me some new and specific numbers and suggested that one-third of the British population sees women as partly to blame for their sexual assault. It seems to me that this view has been prevalent for a long time, and I have no doubt that many more people in countries other than Britain feel this way.

Certainly, how the UK compares to other international countries would be of more interest to me, but it does raise in my mind a question that I have always wanted to raise more publically: does that same 33.3 per cent of the population also place the same kind of blame (flirtatiousness, intoxication, fashion) on males that have been raped? Somehow, I doubt it.