The news story of the date rapist who found his victims through online dating sites captures the two most significant cornerstones of violence against women. Terry L. Smith, the rapist, trolled internet-dating sites, taking women on dates and then sexually assaulting them. Smith himself noted that he expected to be caught sooner and was surprised that more women hadn’t come forth to report his crimes. We live in a media-saturated culture that reveals the gruesome and explicit details and specifics of individual rape cases, which creates a tendency to forget what we’ve long known (though this case reminds us) about sexual assault, which is that violence against women has always relied on two ideological pillars: shame and poor self-esteem.
Shame
Jezebel’s account of the crime spree explains, “Smith met the women online and expected them not to go to the police, knowing that the shame that they felt would prevent them from taking action against him.”
Rapists feel confident repeatedly committing the same crime because the fact is victims rarely tell. When I worked at a rape hotline, the common wisdom (based on calls to rape hotlines nationwide) was that 1 in 10 rapes were reported to the police. And this statistic was based on those women who actually called a hotline for support; never mind those who kept their silence completely.
Smith, as do all rapists, counted on a culture that feeds the shame and self-blame of assault victims. Survivors of sexual assault often try to rationalize the assault by assuming some level of blame themselves (“I shouldn’t have been in that place alone”; “I shouldn’t have been drinking”; “I shouldn’t have smiled at him.”) Even after years of education and advocacy, women have still internalized the message that their responsibility to prevent a rape is somehow more pressing than an assailant’s responsibility to not rape someone. And their inability to prevent the rape creates a deep sense of shame that isolates them and inadvertently ensures the freedom of the rapist.
When nobody talks about a crime that is happening to one in three women over their lifetime, we’ve got a big problem. The solution: talk frankly about this issue with your mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends. Sometimes when we see an account of an assault, the urge to hypothesize about how we might have avoided it is tempting. That’s a normal temptation; it’s a survival instinct. Everyone wants to believe that we can avoid this fate ourselves (and most of us, fortunately, will). But the desire to compare your rape avoidance techniques to those of a woman victimized by rape is pernicious in nature because it ultimately feeds into victim blaming, which contributes to victim shame. Shame leads to silence, which results in more perpetrators on the street, unprosecuted and unrepentant.
Surely that is not your goal when you talk with your friends about how you would have avoided another woman’s assault, but it is one outcome. Our need to feel protected by disparaging another woman’s actions (or inactions) – another woman whose circumstances we know little of – actually enhances the odds for the rapist. And, if you’re having that conversation with women friends, you may inadvertently be silencing them by sending them the message that their drinking, their clothing, their location, or their friendliness to a stranger is the catalyst to their assault and is cause for shame.
Better than the conversation about what a woman did wrong: plan a self-defense class with your group of women friends. Encourage one another to do your best to take action against a violent assault rather than blaming another woman for her choices.
Poor Self-Esteem
One of the women that Smith assaulted was not going to come forward until her 11-year old sister asked her to consider what would happen if someone like Smith came after her or another of their sisters. When the survivor considered her little sister in that position, she felt the need to come forward.
This reaction is surprisingly common. When I’m teaching self-defense to teen girls and adult women, some of my students get particularly squeamish when I discuss eye strikes (this involves putting one’s thumb in the assailant’s eye). I ask students to raise their hands if they believe that they could never perform this self-defense technique in a real scenario, regardless of what the assailant was trying to do. Usually about 1/3 of the class raise their hands. Then I say this: “I want you to think of a younger sibling, cousin, niece, or nephew. Now, picture that young person across a parking lot being pulled into a van by a stranger. If you knew that this eye strike would stop the attack and protect that child, would you do it?” The response is strong and immediate. Every single student says yes without hesitation.
Most of these women and girls would easily dismiss the notion that they have low self-esteem. I usually have the privilege of working with empowered, interesting, strong women whom others look up to. Truly timid women are often too afraid or too much in denial to take a self-defense class, and no one would take a self-defense class if they didn’t have a solid foundation of self-esteem driving their interest in self-protection. But many of my students clearly value themselves less than they value others, which is a defining characteristic of low self-esteem. It’s just not really talked about much because this sort of thinking is common among women: in fact, placing the needs of others above the needs of oneself is a fundamental trait of femininity in our culture.
Why is our impulse to fight on behalf of someone else stronger than our impulse to fight for our own safety? Why can’t we see the children we love and would willingly protect as simply younger versions of our own valuable selves instead of laying blame upon ourselves when we are randomly targeted for a violent crime?
Shame and a cultural investment in women’s poor self-esteem form the pillars of sexual violence against women, making female victims of sexual violence accomplices in their own victimization. This case offers us a clear demonstration of how our silence does not protect us and how violence against women relies on our own complicity.
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