After the comment by a Canadian police officer that women should avoid “dressing up like sluts” if they don’t want to be raped, women have responded by organising ‘Slutwalks’, protests where women march in their “slutty” clothes, demanding an end to the victim-blaming mentality behind rape.
Some are walking to reclaim the word slut in the same way the gay community reclaimed “queer”, turning these hateful words in to words of empowerment. Others though, detest the word, and are marching for the right not to be called a slut, no matter what they wear.
The marches however, are dividing women, who although all believe that victims of rape should not be blamed for the act, wonder if the “Slutwalk” is the right approach. Some believe that “slut” is too strong to ever be reclaimed, others, such as author of Pornland, anti-porn campaigner Gail Dines that women who dress up in “slutty” clothes are pandering to male desires, and are only reinforcing that in today’s raunch culture, women need to be hypersexualised in order to be noticed.
Others believe that although rape and victim blaming are by no means non-issues, the women protesting are not the ones highly affected by sexual assault, and that the protests are a cruel irony to those for whom rape and domestic violence is a daily struggle, such as in the Congo, where four women are raped every five minutes.
Commentator Margaret Wente believes:
“The attitude that rape victims bring it on themselves has largely (though not entirely) disappeared from mainstream society. When a Manitoba judge recently blamed the victim in a rape case for leading her attacker on, he was universally ridiculed. Everybody was amazed that any judge today would be so ignorant.”
Potentially these women forget that sexual assaults are more often crimes of power than of lust, and they occur most frequently in the home, or by someone the victim knows. Disabled women are commonly raped because of an inability to fight back, and for women in Canada’s south Asian population (very close to York, where the protest movement started) sexual assault and domestic violence is rife in the home. These kinds of crimes have nothing to do with a woman’s body or her choice of dress, they are entrenched practices about subjugation and power plays. Women such as these will not be saved by Slutwalks.
But despite this, Slutwalks worldwide already have and undoubtedly will bring more focus to these issues, in turn potentially pressuring those in government and law enforcement to dedicate more time and resources to the eradication of these terrible crimes.
No Comments