Satire On Rape

Don’t Get Raped

It was the kind of day where you could smell the rain in the air. Standing at the bus stop on the edge of the sidewalk having just hopped off the rumbling school bus, everything seemed to be happening through a theater screen. One moment I was fantasizing about the food I was going to scarf down on reaching home and the other I felt the unstable thumph thum thum thumph thumph of terror. It all happened in fast succession, the girl running to the crowd at the bus stop, green girdle tied around her school uniform unraveling around her waist, the man following her, big arms, big shoulders, big fists, big eyes alight with the red blaze of lust and anger, an anger shaped around the fact that the girl he lusted had the audacity to

Two percent of reported rapists are never convicted by law.

When speaking of rape we often advocate the idea that victims should be held responsible for keeping themselves safe. While this is a good precautionary measure, we should focus more on teaching perpetrators not to rape rather than teaching victims how not to get raped. This will reduce the prominently of rape culture by not only blaming the perpetrator rather than the victim but also de-normalizing rape and allowing victims to speak forth without fear which will hence lead to the apprehension of more perpetrators and lessens rape

Hence, 68% of sexual assaults are not reported. The question remains: why? There are an array of reasons that victims can provide to justify their complete inabiltiy to report assault: “I wasnt wearing a skirt long enough”, “I shouldn’t have acted so flirty”, “I was too scared”, “I thought it was normal.” There is a common factor to all these reasons – rape culture cultivated because of victim-blaming. In a rape culture, rape is considered a normal occurence, it is not designated as a negative thing because it’s barely talked about it at all. The absence of openness about rape inflicts fear in victims; they figure since its not talked about, it either normal or it doesn’t happen very much and its their fault. This leads to self-blame, since it was the victims fault they must have done something wrong, was the skirt too short, the personality too irresisitible, the body asking to be assaulted? Furthermore, society tends to invite the idea that rape is the victims fault. As the satire displayed in the cartoon attached below, blaming the victim for providing a body to be raped is equivalent to having blaming the owners for providing possesssions to be stolen. This sound ridiculous, however, it is still a huge hindering factor to destroying rape