Earlier this month, Lindsey Kushner, QC sentenced Ricardo Rodrigues-Forets-Gomes, 19, to six years in prison after he was found guilty of two counts of rape. In her sentencing remarks, she said: ‘Girls are perfectly entitled to drink themselves into the ground but should be aware people who are potential defendants to rape gravitate towards girls who have been drinking.’
She added: ‘It shouldn't be like that, but it does happen and we see it time and time again.’
The victim, Megan Clark, had been drinking - vodka and beer, if that matters - the night she was raped last July. Following outrage - how dare the judge, a female one at that, suggest that women’s behaviour must change to make way for errant male violence? - Megan waived her anonymity to speak to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme.
‘I [now] know it wasn’t my fault. It’s never the victim’s fault - they aren’t the problem, regardless of what I was doing,’ she told the presenter, continuing: ‘I felt I put myself in that situation. I need to be more careful.’
I feel sympathy for Megan. She had a traumatic experience, relived by testifying in court. And if I had been through an iota of what she’s been through, I would do or say anything to never again be a target of sexual violence. Why invest in long-term cures when you’ve got sutures to keep clean?
Because I know that one in three women will be a victim of sexual violence in their lifetime, I sometimes wonder when my rape will be. Perhaps down a darkened alley one night, at the grubby claws of a stranger? Or maybe at home, in my bed, with someone too blinded by pride to notice my boundaries? Will I feel comfortable to go to the police about it? Could I say the words out loud? If I do, will the police take me seriously? Would they have the resources to? I know now that though reports of rape are rising, and that’s meant to be a good thing, police are struggling to handle the workload. Would I be able to stomach facing my attacker in court, facing a quiz on my sex life while his previous convictions are legally censored? And would I ever be able to trust anyone near my body again?
Each time my mind begins to tumble down this rabbit hole, along swoops a short-term solution, a rape-hack, if you will. And it simply goes: ‘don’t get raped.’
Judge Kushner’s suggestion of cutting down on alcohol was probably right from a medical perspective - the entire UK needs to address its relationship with booze. But, apply the logic by which she said women shouldn’t drink to other parts of women’s bodies and behaviours which seemingly attract rapists. If she’s right to say drinking puts women in danger, she’d be right to say that women put themselves in danger when their body grows breasts, or bums, or hips, or any of those other biological extensions of the self that set them apart from men, as other, as sexualised, from the very moment they enter puberty. She’d also be right to say that women put themselves in danger when they spend time with their family, or friends, or boyfriends and husbands, because we all know by now that 85% of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. And of course, she’d be right to say women put themselves in danger simply by existing around dangerous men, who don’t need any excuse bar the knowledge they won’t get caught to encroach on a woman’s body.
Though men can find it tricky being part of a culture encouraging them to partake in limitless access to women’s bodies, women cannot escape being part of a culture which tells them to change to avoid wayward men’s crimes.
Some might say you’d never leave your laptop on your car-seat, that you’d put alarms on your house or car to stop theft. But rape isn’t theft, it’s rape. It’s someone repeatedly putting a penis into your body without checking if that’s ok with you first, it’s someone showing you that your body is their space to enter, that your mind is theirs to squat upon until the ends of time.
‘Rape’ isn’t a switch drunk women can turn on, or, by sobering up, turn off. It’s something that avaricious men - legally, it is only men who can rape - flick on and off on their own whims.
To many nameless commentators - who, you’ll note, have done the precise sum of zero to attack the root cause of rape, perhaps supposing this is natural order, nothing to see here, move along please - Megan was almost the utterly imperfect victim. She was a woman who dared to drink in public space while simultaneously expecting her body to be treated with the calm respect men’s bodies enjoy without even realising it. But now, Megan’s the perfect victim. Not because she’s working her way through processing a horrible experience the best and only way she knows how. But because she’s helped detract attention away from tackling a culture wherein, it’s the UK, 2017, and men are still encouraged to feel entitled to sex and/or women’s bodies, if not just to look at, then to touch, feel and prod at.
I fully understand Megan’s appreciation of Judge Kushner; this the woman who imprisoned her attacker, this is the woman who did what the justice system fails to do every single day. Did you know that every hour, 11 people in the UK will be raped? And yet only 11,000 convictions of all types of sexual crime last year? With odds stacked like that, it wouldn’t take a huge collapse in any victim’s morals to deify everyone who helped their attacker see justice, let alone the person to send their attacker to jail. But if we, as a general public, are to take any of Judge Kushner’s words seriously, let them be: ‘It shouldn’t be like that’. Because, with a lot of might, and a lot of focus on the root cause of rape - rapists - it won’t be like that.
Image courtesy of BBC News
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.