You must have overlooked my examples. It is routine, after a man rapes a woman, for people to ask things like "What was she wearing?" or "Why was she at that party?" or to say things like "Well, after all, she has a reputation for being 'loose'" or "Goes to show that a young woman shouldn't be out so late alone." (The example questions in my previous comment are also very common, and illustrate the "can't win" situation that women wind up in.)
It may not be immediately obvious that those questions boil down to "making excuses for rapists", but if you sit and think about it for five minutes it's a hard conclusion to avoid. The focus routinely shifts away from "that man did something awful" and toward "that woman made some mistakes".
There's a big difference between giving safety advice and excusing rape.
The same could be applied in other situations, for example if I go out alone late at night in the wrong part of town whilst displaying my expensive consumer gadgets , leave my house unlocked and go out or leave my server connected to the internet with a blank root password people might rightly ask "why the hell did you do that?". This doesn't in any way condone the actions of a mugger/burgler/hacker etc but sadly one must acknowledge that there are bad elements in society and recommend appropriate mitigation.
So yes, a woman who put her in a situation where she was likely to be raped did make some mistakes, but that doesn't excuse somebody who takes advantage of that.
> The same could be applied in other situations, for example if I go out alone late at night in the wrong part of town whilst displaying my expensive consumer gadgets
This is a great example. I went to a university inside of a major city and at several points during freshmen orientation we were told to be careful about what sort of electronics we display while outside, particularly at night. "Don't wear your expensive headphones while walking around the city, consider buying a case that covers your phone, travel in groups when possible." ..that sort of thing.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that they were making excuses for muggers.
It's really not a great example, though there are obviously similarities. Rather than repeating myself at length, I'll just suggest that you read my response to the parent post.
This stuff is complicated, and I know that it took me an awfully long time to begin figuring it out (or to even accept that there was something I needed to figure out). I used to say things that sounded a lot like your comment here.
I don't anymore. Give it some time, and some thought.
Do you agree that, to the extent to which the safety advice given to women mirrors the safety advice given to starry-eyed freshmen about muggers and thieves, such safety advice does not represent a manifestation of rape culture?
I don't think victim blaming is an imagined phenomenon, but I do think that the extent to which it permeates it's society is often exaggerated, to the extent that people who give reasonable safety advice can occasionally be vilified as contributing to it.
I more or less agree with what you've said, though it still makes me uncomfortable that it only applies to women. Some level of advice on ways to reduce risk is clearly necessary.
But, as I've said elsewhere, it is my strong impression that the advice given to women regarding rape does not merely mirror other safety advice. There are many places where those starry-eyed freshmen would be forgiven for letting down their guard against muggers (inside their own dorm, for instance), but women are allowed no such safe spaces. The freshmen are given just a few rules to remember ("Don't flaunt your expensive headphones south of 61st St."), but women are given endless lists. The freshmen hear their advice when they show up at college, but women get rape prevention tips drilled into them from childhood so they completely internalize it. And by and large, the advice those freshmen get is simple enough that it doesn't contain any Catch-22's like my earlier example: a woman can be blamed for angering the man who raped her by being rude OR for leading him on if she's polite, so some people will fault her either way.
Yes, this always looks like just "giving safety advice", and yes, similar advice does get offered after other crimes. The difference in the case of rape is the extraordinary range and intrusiveness of such "advice" that all women (and only women) are expected to follow every day to avoid being faulted for negligence if they wind up being a victim. As illustrated by the contradictory example questions in my earlier comment, it's quite common for people to find a way to portray a rape victim as negligent no matter what choices she made.
I completely understand if you're not on board with this perspective right away; it took me a long time, too. But honestly: keep your eyes open from here on out when you read media reports of rape and you will see how universal this "fault the victim" attitude is. Watch for it for a while, and then really do sit down and think hard about it for those five uninterrupted minutes.
Here's an example for starters: media coverage of an 11-year-old girl forcibly gang raped by 18 grown men. You'd like to think they wouldn't have bothered reporting on how she dressed, wouldn't you? http://www.salon.com/2011/03/09/new_york_times_blames_11_yea...
I would agree that it is unfortunate the lengths that women may have to go to in order to minimise their risk, however I don't think that ignoring these factors does anybody any good. Ideally nobody should have to take any measures to prevent anything bad from happening, but that's not how the world is.
I am in the UK , so perhaps culture is somewhat different here but I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed.
In fact there have been cases of premature "justice" taken against individuals before all of the facts are in. And it's not completely unknown for threat of fake rape accusations to be used as a method of blackmail. In other words branding somebody as a rapist is a sure fire way to fuck their life up, quite different from "everyone blames the victim".
Even though it is not pleasant reading I don't think it hurts to report on all of the facts in such cases if doing so might help others to avoid these situations. For example if I had a daughter I know I would want to give frank and strongly worded advice if I thought it might make her even a little bit safer, but if something were to happen I would certainly not blame her.
"I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed."
Unfortunately, this is not typically what happens. Remember, we're not usually talking about some guy leaping out of a dark alley and grabbing a stranger walking by. Most rapists know their victims and interact with them socially in the lead-up to the assault. Many deliberately arrange circumstances designed to create doubt about what happened and whether it was consensual.
I hate to link to a scumbag, but there was a reddit post several months ago by a serial rapist describing his methods that illustrates this quite clearly: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/x6yef/reddits_had... It is absolutely chilling reading, but horribly informative (as are his replies to questions later on). I'm as skeptical of anonymous comments as the next guy, but in the aftermath I saw a number of people saying, "Don't give him the attention he wants: you can see exactly the same methods and mentality in formal studies of convicted rapists instead." (Sadly, I never saw links to those studies, so I'm still linking to the scumbag.) It's clear that this isn't the sort of thing that inspires vigilante mobs, but my understanding is that it's by far the most common scenario.
Meanwhile, you need to be really cautious about bringing up the "false rape accusation" objection. Yes, they happen, and it's awful when they do. But every statistic I've ever seen indicates that the number of false accusations is miniscule compared with even the number of reported rapes, let along the number that don't get reported at all (perhaps because the only evidence was "he said/she said" that would get brushed off as potentially a false accusation). Treating actual rapes and false accusations as some sort of evenly balanced poles deserving equal consideration is not justified by the statistics.
It may not be immediately obvious that those questions boil down to "making excuses for rapists", but if you sit and think about it for five minutes it's a hard conclusion to avoid. The focus routinely shifts away from "that man did something awful" and toward "that woman made some mistakes".