Our culture devalues female experiences of violence, while men, such as Ched Evans, who are convicted of rape are often pitied in the media.
This article was originally featured in The Guardian. You can read the original article here.
Media coverage of sexual violence never seems to be higher, yet it paints an inconsistent and incomplete picture that has left many of us confused. From reports that complaints of sexual violence are on the rise, to the public naming for the second time of the woman who was raped by professional footballer, Ched Evans, we learn that more women are coming forward but that they are far from always being believed.
Police figures released by the Office for National Statistics reveal that the number of rapes reported increased by 29% in the year to June. The police are quick to point to the growing confidence in victims to come forward and report rape. Yet police forces continue to woefully underperform when it comes to investigating rapes through to successful convictions. In the year 2013-14, a third of rape cases were dropped. This continued record of failure discourages women from reporting rape as institutions repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot deliver justice.
Beyond police forces, universities too are failing rape victims. One in four students at university receive unwanted sexual advances, yet only a tiny proportion of these incidents are reported.
In the Cambridge University Student Union’s women’s campaign survey into sexual harassment at the university, 88% of respondents who said they had experienced sexual harassment did not report the incident. Moreover, in many institutions policies to stamp out sexual harassment fail to provide adequate support for victims or to encourage them to come forward.
At my college in Cambridge, for instance, the harassment policy fails to state that it will investigate any complaint that is made, or that students who do make a complaint will be protected from adverse social or academic consequences. Instead, it warns that those who make false accusations will face severe consequences for disrupting the college community and “causing much stress. This is emphasised more than once in the policy. The focus on false accusations feeds into the culture of fear that intimidates victims from reporting rape.
The harassment policy also suggests one should speak to the perpetrator of the harassment to “reconcile”. It says: “Complaints of harassment may often, it is hoped, be resolved informally in consultation with the complainant.” This is obviously a distressing and potentially traumatising prospect for most victims of rape or sexual assault. What’s more, the policy does not even list what constitutes sexual harassment, thus leaving any victim feeling helpless and cautious when considering whether or not to report an incident. The body of support that is so desperately needed to encourage victims to come forward does not exist in most universities.
The cultural context that we live in also plays a role in discouraging the reporting of rape, along with adequate penalties for rapists. Men convicted of rape are often pitied in the media and, like Evans, quickly vault back to positions of fame. When US National Football League player, Ray Rice, viciously beat his fiancé unconscious, the media circulated a video to feed the public’s morbid curiosity. When men kill their partners, (twice a week in the UK) the world forgets the woman victim’s name as in the case of Reeva Steenkamp.
Coming forward in a culture that devalues female experiences of violence is extremely difficult, and if we really want to see a dramatic shift in how rape is dealt with as a crime we need to change our society’s treatment of violence against women. But there are still so many women who are terrified of reporting rape because the institutions that ought to be helping them threaten, traumatise, vilify and ultimately fail them. The attitudes of institutions and the backdrop of popular culture leads rape victims to doubt themselves, internalise feelings of shame and guilt and to suppress their experiences.