“Rape culture does not exist.” I have heard this statement repeated hundreds of times. Even when cases regarding rape, such as the Steubenville case, become entangled in a haze of media coverage and scrutiny, society as a whole refuses to acknowledge this abhorrent phenomenon as a problem.
Fear surrounds the phrase “rape culture.” We fear that using that term means every man is under attack or that every man is a rapist. This isn’t true. Rape culture doesn’t refer to the frequency that sexual attacks occur in this nation, though the numbers are startlingly high, much of it refers to the aftermath and response.
On Jan. 8, 2012, Melinda Coleman opened her front door in Maryville, Mo. after hearing a feeble knocking in the early hours of the morning. Coleman found her 14-year-old daughter, Daisy, bloodied, incoherent and half naked in 22 degree weather. Daisy had been brutally raped and left for dead on her own front porch by a 17-year-old male at a party she had snuck out to attend, hoping to fit in.
It was a nightmare with no answer. Where does a mother go when the community blames her daughter for being attacked? Yes, she went to a party. Yes, she consumed alcohol. That’s not a green light for assault. There is no argument in the world that justifies another human being taken advantage of someone, inebriated or not.
So what happened to the rapist? All charges were dropped under the pretense that there wasn’t sufficient evidence. The survivor was harassed for months following the attack. The Coleman family left Maryville after pressure and scrutiny from the community.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the accused rapist had connections in the small town, allowing him to elude charges. This blatant injustice would have been the end of it, had the online “hacktivist” group Anonymous not picked the story a few months ago. #Justice4Daisy began trending on Twitter, alongside hundreds of phone calls and emails with demands for retribution.
It’s entirely possible. However, if Daisy stayed silent and tried to heal the scars of her attack without the assistance of the criminal justice system, her voice would merely have been one of many. Thousands of sexual assault cases are not brought to trial in the United States.
Our culture is far too comfortable with the survivor blaming and teaching women “not to drink, not to tempt” rather than teaching men “not to rape.” Men don’t have an innate, uncontrollable desire to sexually harm, and to suggest so hurts the image of men. Rape culture discredits men as much as it hurts women.
A society cannot be evaluated as being progressive and an example for others when it takes an online grassroots movement to get a rape case to trial. So long as we turn a blind eye, we will remain a culture that seeks to excuse rapists, rather than a culture that seeks to end rape.
