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Sparked by this post about men needing to step up when it comes to talking about rape...
My strongest memory of my father so far is of him saying, when I was maybe 16, in response to something to do with rape and reporting and how often it's *really* made up, "If you came home and said you'd been raped, how would I know you were telling the truth?"
Not in a rhetorical, 'of course I would know, because I know you, but...' way. As a genuine question. I'm not someone who lies, or regularly exagerates things. I wasn't, at 16, someone who slept with a lot of (any) guys or dated (at all). I spent my evenings helping backstage at a theatre or curled up with a book while me friends went out drinking.
My father wouldn't have believed me if I went home and said I'd been raped, because to him, it's more likely that his own daughter would lie than that a man could do that to me.
What does that say about gender and how we define ourselves? What does it say about my chances with the police, with a stranger, if I was raped?
What does it say that when I think about the possibility of that happening to me, I can script the counter-argument to 'I was raped' - 'you're just saying that because you're gay and you slept with a man.'
When I was seventeen, I was lying in a park, waiting for my dad to finish work and give me a ride home. It was summer, I was wearing a skirt, I had my knees bent. A man came and sat down near me, asked me what colour underwear I was wearing. And I told him. Then he told me he'd pay me to let him watch me pee. I said no, I waited for him to leave. I never told anyone about that. Why didn't I scream? Or run? Or move? Because it wouldn't have been polite. Because I didn't want to make a fuss.
Because at seventeen, I already knew enough about how men treat women that I didn't think of it as something *worth* making a fuss over. It was just part of being a girl.
When I was eighteen, I was sitting on a bench eating lunch, and this car went past me, three times. The fourth time, the guy pulled over and explicitly propositioned me. I don't think I even said anything, I walked off, back into work. When I told my mum that evening, I couldn't even say what he'd said, I had to write it down, and then I cried for an hour because I was that scared. We reported it to the police, who, to their credit, called me in, sat me in an interview room with my mum, took a statement and showed me pictures. With a male police officer, but we'll skip over that part. You know what I thought? Why didn't I write down the license number?
You know why we reported it? Because I worked at a nursery at the time.
Most people I've told that to, even knowing where I worked, don't understand why I reported it. It was just a come on, right? I must have over-reacted, and nothing I can say will convince them that *I felt like he was a threat*.
I've never met a woman who, if we're talking about something where this kind of thing comes up, can't tell me, without needing to think about it, a time when something like that happened to her. Or something worse. Often something worse, and you know how that sentence nearly ended? 'I've been lucky.' Yeah, because we consider people lucky if they don't get murdered. We consider them lucky if they only get beaten up a little bit. People definitely considered me lucky when it was my bag that was stolen not my house that was broken into.
Guess what? My bag's got more right to be left alone than I do.
I work in domestic violence and abuse, and I read the 'if your partner does several of these things frequently, it's probably abuse' lists, and I know two people that list applies to. I stopped reading one of my favourite SGA fics, because now when I read it, I think 'this Rodney is an abusive partner.' He doesn't hit John, he doesn't shout or belittle him, or anything that we'd think of as abusive, and the author clearly means him to be a wonderful person, and for it to be a wonderful relationship. Except that Rodney, in her story, sure as hell knows how to manipulate John, and John's daughter, and he scares John's daughter. Am I hyper-sensitised because of my job, or are most people under-sensitised to this?
My sister's response to hearing I was involved with Reclaim the Night here was 'but you should be careful on the street at night.' She thinks I should take a taxi home instead of walk two minutes from the bus stop by my house, and if I must walk, I shouldn't do it with my headphones on. She thinks I should carry an attack alarm. She thinks her boyfriend would be safer than me, is more able to defend himself, and honestly, I don't know how to deal with her when she says this stuff, because what I want to say is, "Can you hear yourself?" Because while she's telling me that no-one has the right to feel totally safe no matter what they do, she's saying that her boyfriend, by virtue of being a man is more able to defend himself, and therefore doesn't have to take the precautions I do. Sometimes, she really frightens me.
Last thing, I promise. Knife crime in Britain is falling rapidly right now. Know why? Because the people who were going around knifing other people are going around raping them instead, because you don't need a weapon for that, and you're a hell of a lot less likely to get caught or convicted. And no, that's not just speculation - rates of reported rape have been going up since the government started cracking down on knife crime. Not conviction rates, just reporting rates. Odd how there's no media outcry over that, isn't it?
This gets my 'rage' tag because it's the closest I have. What I need is an 'exhausted resignation' tag.
My strongest memory of my father so far is of him saying, when I was maybe 16, in response to something to do with rape and reporting and how often it's *really* made up, "If you came home and said you'd been raped, how would I know you were telling the truth?"
Not in a rhetorical, 'of course I would know, because I know you, but...' way. As a genuine question. I'm not someone who lies, or regularly exagerates things. I wasn't, at 16, someone who slept with a lot of (any) guys or dated (at all). I spent my evenings helping backstage at a theatre or curled up with a book while me friends went out drinking.
My father wouldn't have believed me if I went home and said I'd been raped, because to him, it's more likely that his own daughter would lie than that a man could do that to me.
What does that say about gender and how we define ourselves? What does it say about my chances with the police, with a stranger, if I was raped?
What does it say that when I think about the possibility of that happening to me, I can script the counter-argument to 'I was raped' - 'you're just saying that because you're gay and you slept with a man.'
When I was seventeen, I was lying in a park, waiting for my dad to finish work and give me a ride home. It was summer, I was wearing a skirt, I had my knees bent. A man came and sat down near me, asked me what colour underwear I was wearing. And I told him. Then he told me he'd pay me to let him watch me pee. I said no, I waited for him to leave. I never told anyone about that. Why didn't I scream? Or run? Or move? Because it wouldn't have been polite. Because I didn't want to make a fuss.
Because at seventeen, I already knew enough about how men treat women that I didn't think of it as something *worth* making a fuss over. It was just part of being a girl.
When I was eighteen, I was sitting on a bench eating lunch, and this car went past me, three times. The fourth time, the guy pulled over and explicitly propositioned me. I don't think I even said anything, I walked off, back into work. When I told my mum that evening, I couldn't even say what he'd said, I had to write it down, and then I cried for an hour because I was that scared. We reported it to the police, who, to their credit, called me in, sat me in an interview room with my mum, took a statement and showed me pictures. With a male police officer, but we'll skip over that part. You know what I thought? Why didn't I write down the license number?
You know why we reported it? Because I worked at a nursery at the time.
Most people I've told that to, even knowing where I worked, don't understand why I reported it. It was just a come on, right? I must have over-reacted, and nothing I can say will convince them that *I felt like he was a threat*.
I've never met a woman who, if we're talking about something where this kind of thing comes up, can't tell me, without needing to think about it, a time when something like that happened to her. Or something worse. Often something worse, and you know how that sentence nearly ended? 'I've been lucky.' Yeah, because we consider people lucky if they don't get murdered. We consider them lucky if they only get beaten up a little bit. People definitely considered me lucky when it was my bag that was stolen not my house that was broken into.
Guess what? My bag's got more right to be left alone than I do.
I work in domestic violence and abuse, and I read the 'if your partner does several of these things frequently, it's probably abuse' lists, and I know two people that list applies to. I stopped reading one of my favourite SGA fics, because now when I read it, I think 'this Rodney is an abusive partner.' He doesn't hit John, he doesn't shout or belittle him, or anything that we'd think of as abusive, and the author clearly means him to be a wonderful person, and for it to be a wonderful relationship. Except that Rodney, in her story, sure as hell knows how to manipulate John, and John's daughter, and he scares John's daughter. Am I hyper-sensitised because of my job, or are most people under-sensitised to this?
My sister's response to hearing I was involved with Reclaim the Night here was 'but you should be careful on the street at night.' She thinks I should take a taxi home instead of walk two minutes from the bus stop by my house, and if I must walk, I shouldn't do it with my headphones on. She thinks I should carry an attack alarm. She thinks her boyfriend would be safer than me, is more able to defend himself, and honestly, I don't know how to deal with her when she says this stuff, because what I want to say is, "Can you hear yourself?" Because while she's telling me that no-one has the right to feel totally safe no matter what they do, she's saying that her boyfriend, by virtue of being a man is more able to defend himself, and therefore doesn't have to take the precautions I do. Sometimes, she really frightens me.
Last thing, I promise. Knife crime in Britain is falling rapidly right now. Know why? Because the people who were going around knifing other people are going around raping them instead, because you don't need a weapon for that, and you're a hell of a lot less likely to get caught or convicted. And no, that's not just speculation - rates of reported rape have been going up since the government started cracking down on knife crime. Not conviction rates, just reporting rates. Odd how there's no media outcry over that, isn't it?
This gets my 'rage' tag because it's the closest I have. What I need is an 'exhausted resignation' tag.
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