A video called The Public Rape Experiment is going viral and, as the name suggests, it’s not without controversy. Made at the request of a rape survivor, the mini film shows footage of the victim – kept anonymous through a silhouette – telling the story of how she was attacked in a public bathroom on her 13th birthday by her cousin.
While the attack was happening, a man was in the bathroom, but didn’t do anything to stop the assault. ‘All this time I wondered why no one helped me when they heard me scream. For years, I felt like it was my fault,' she recalls.
In a part reconstruction of the attack, the makers of the video – intending to 'raise awareness' about rape – put speakers in a toilet cubicle, playing the noises of actors faking an attack to see if members of the public would do anything when they heard the muffled screams and a man’s voice repeatedly telling the woman to ‘shut up’. Watch what happens below:
The video is rightly getting praise for shining light on our attitudes to rape, with its 'powerful message' described as 'gut wrenching because it hits close to home.'
But it's also attracting some criticism, mostly for the bit at the end, where the men who do enter the bathroom are greeted with a mirror and red writing on the wall saying, 'THIS IS WHAT A RAPIST COULD LOOK LIKE.' Critics have said that the message implies all men could rape. One commenter on YouTube shared: 'Fuck you hardly any men would rape someone its disgusting and one of the worst crimes only a tiny minority if people would [sic].'
The director Yousef Erakat insists that the criticsm is missing the point, and explained on Twitlonger that his message was that, as the woman narrates 'we all have the capacity to rape', even people you wouldn't assume to be rapists.
Yousef explained, ‘Many people after watching the video took offense to the writing on the wall and thought it was saying, "LOOK IN THIS MIRROR. YOU ARE A RAPIST." No, no, no. In today's society, to be a "rapist" is to be some sort of "other" person who has issues within themselves and isn't an everyday normal civilian.’ The director added: ‘But that isn't the case. the mirror was saying, "Look at how you look in this mirror, a rapist could look EXACTLY like you," meaning it could be anyone. Mo matter what they look like or what they struggle with, they are capable of rape… These labels don't have faces. They don't have characteristics. They don't have color, language, beliefs etc. It could be an everyday civilian, JUST LIKE YOU.’
And it holds up in fact – in America, 84 per cent of women know their rapists before the attack is committed and, according to Rape Crisis UK, 'There is no typical rapist, 85 per cent of rapists are men known to their victims.'
As for the men who walked away? Although Yousef explained to the men who did enter the bathroom that they'd taken part in an experiment, he doesn't make it clear in his Twitlonger whether he'd told the rest that they had witnessed a hypothetical rape (as oppose to an actual one). This doesn't do much for the theories that women cry rape, especially when only 15 per cent of the 85,000 women raped in the UK each year will report it, the other 85 per cent fearful they won't be believed. Still, the video does mean we're talking about rape, and if it's encouraging men to question their behaviour (instead of that time-old cliché of telling women how to act to avoid rape), then it must be a good thing, right?
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.