Is Rape Culture Justified In Asking For It

“They are all proven innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a lair until I am proven honest.”- Louise O’Neill, Asking For It. When trials for sexual offenses are held, the victims must prove beyond a doubt that they did not consent to the act performed on them by showing the clothes they were wearing before and during the violation, while these clothing pieces are used against them to prove the offender innocent when no matter why or how consent is revoked or never given it automatically becomes a crime. Throughout history, rape culture has been blaming victims of sexual violence, no matter how “small” it is to the public, today's society claims to be above this gruesome past but does not even realize how prevalent this issue is because

Any unwanted comments or “innocent” touches are considered sexual assault, along with the victim giving consent under threats or nagging. Many women give in to men because they ridicule them for saying no and feel they should listen just because a man said so. The definition of rape in Webster's Dictionary is an “unlawful sexual activity...carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will or with a person who is … incapable of valid consent,” (Webster, 1961). No matter who the person is or what they are wearing, if they are unable or unwilling to consent, any act done to them is liable in court to be tried as rape or sexual assault. Women are taught to be perfect daughters and wives, which means not standing up for themselves and listening to what the men in their lives tell them. Rape culture allows men to be misogynistic and aggressive towards others. When someone is raped or sexually assaulted and is brave enough to report it, the authorities will not believe the victim because the offenders are usually men who know how other men think, making the offense seem less important as a

A study done on the severity of sexual crimes and the urgency of which the crime was solved was conducted and it showed that when a police officer was informed of a rape case, there was no immediate effort to solve it unless the victim was a child or murdered during the assault. The assailant was not captured or convicted because the evidence of the case was only the word of the victim. The rapists were usually informed on how to commit the crime without being caught with factors such as intimidation of the victim, use of appearance-altering devices, and the use of multiple locations to confuse the victim, causing the police to have to arrest someone on a hunch of who the offender is (Chopin, 2019). When a man goes through the effort to make a sexual assault look like it never happened just because they wanted to rape someone, it shows that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to get what they want. What is stopping them from committing more violent crimes? Society. A man can murder someone and be prosecuted at trial, but if he rapes someone, he would not endure any consequences because it is much more acceptable in the modern world to rape than murder or theft. There are people with minimal drug charges in prison for more time than someone convicted of sexual assault. Who is to blame for this horrific tolerance of