Everyone has known a woman like this 🥺 can’t criticize what she’s been through but she’s out there perpetuating harm and you can’t make her see that
It took my mom decades to see the truth about what happened to her as a little girl. She didn’t tell my grandmother until a couple years ago. Heartbreaking.
It’s one of the many reasons that blaming victims should be called out each and every time. It’s imperative to be honest about these crimes and to believe victims when they come forward.
It’s imperative to be honest about these crimes and to believe victims when they come forward.
That is also not without its problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_rape_hoax?wprov=sfla1
The Duke case resulted from a journalist who thought doing an investigation would be the same as disbelieving a victim, and editors who agreed. Now rape-apologists have a bloody shirt to wave around.
I’m for provisionally believing people, but also not rushing to judgement in each and every case. We can do both.
I never really understood believe victims to mean punish the accused with no evidence beyond testimony, more that we don’t need to loudly declare that victims are probably actually liars and offer support to people who clearly need it
The rate of false claims is much, much lower than actual rape and sexual assault. It’s not non-existent, but we shouldn’t immediately assume a rape victim is lying.
More often than not, the default is to dismiss and downplay claims.
For the one case at Duke, I can pull dozens (probably hundreds) of real rape cases at universities.
My problem with lowering the legal standard from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “believe victims”, isn’t that there are a lot of false reports.
Right now no one believes or prosecutes real reports because of rape culture, why would anyone bother with a fake report? However, if we decide all someone has to do is say “this person raped me” and that’s enough to put someone in jail then assholes are going to start filling false reports to hurt people they don’t like.
I believe that men and women are all people and that many people are assholes. So I think the same women who, as men, would commit violent crimes now have a shockingly easy way to hurt people. And even if you believe that women are better people than men and they would rarely do it no matter how easy it is, men can do it to.
All it would take is to meet up with someone, escape to a private space ideally with witnesses and now I can claim they raped me. I think that makes it dangerously easy for assholes of any genders to really hurt someone through the legal system.
I’d like to see what a functional legal system that cares more about protecting victims than it does about protecting “promising young men” looks like. One where we exterminate the rape culture that saturates our legal system. If we actually prosecuted and punished rape cases that currently ALREADY MEET the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would by itself fix a huge part of the problem.
Also, until we fix our general rape culture you would just have tons of jury nullification, tons of judges and prosecutors throwing cases because the “threshold is too low”. People talk about jury nullification as if was a good thing, but 90% of the time it was used was for protecting white racists in Jim Crowe and protecting usually drunk drivers in vehicular homicide cases. It will be used here if people think the threshold of “believe victims” is too low.
“Believe women” for me works when interacting with the victim. Why people have to start picking apart a traumatic story when they hear it is insane to me. It’s crazy that we need rhetoric to tell people “if someone trusts you with a traumatic story, don’t be a dick about it”.
This is one of those comics where I have no clue what’s actually going on and who Jane Doe is and subsequently want to look it up but then realise that I really don’t need that information in my life, it’s probably a harrowing and dreadful story. I’m gonna enjoy my blissful ignorance and listen to ride the cyclone instead.
Jane Doe is the title of the chainsaw man movie ending theme and thats all I need to know about that. Banger song and movie tho
Why is this getting down votes, the song IS good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPLqsLsooJY
Probably because they kinda said they didn’t care about the rape.
Huh I Didn’t say that and didn’t notice you could read it like that. I meant I dont need to know more. I know a reference and that reference has a tragic backstory to it and I don’t want to traumatize myself by knowing the actual backstory. Thank you for telling me
thats all I need to know about that.
Yeah it was this little detail that reads that way.
By all means, avoid the details as needed for your own mental health. I really understand that reaction. As long as it isn’t in a dismissive way of course.
I remember My mother thinking the TV series Mad Men was too real because she worked in the late 70s and was sexually harassed as a 20 year old.
It’s all wild to me, The reception in my office are all like my little sisters, I just want to protect them and annoy them.
A term that I stumbled across a few years ago is “hermeneutical injustice”, a phrase that was coined in response to sexual harassment in the 70s and onwards. It refers to when people who have faced an injustice don’t have the language to be able to talk about their experiences properly, which inhibits their ability to personally process their experiences, as well as making it harder to organise against the systemic injustice they had faced. It’s effectively an extra layer of systemic injustice on top of what they have already experienced.
Linking this to something concrete, we can look at the fact that when women were first entering the workplace in the 60s and 70s, “sexual harassment” wasn’t a term that existed, and women who experienced it struggled to communicate their experiences authentically. “What do you mean you’re upset because your boss bought you flowers? He’s just being nice”.
“Sexual harassment” being coined made it possible for people (especially women) to talk about their experiences in the workplace in a manner that led to some structural change. Whilst it’s still depressingly common in the workplace, as you highlight in your comment, we have come a long way.
That to me is the really surreal part of all this — the fact that if you existed in the 70s, you’d be far less likely to even notice problematic conduct such as that seen in Mad Men
Very interesting, thankyou
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francine_Gottfried
Easy example of what women had to deal with back then.
The sheer amount of violence that women and children are expected to absorb as normal in order to maintain the illusion of a civilized society is honestly staggering to look at.
Now here’s the fun thing. The undue pressure it puts on men is toxic as fuck too. This doesn’t benefit anyone!
Yeah, and this is NOT a “blame the victim thing” but women and children get to have pressure to just accept “their place” as the “lesser” but there are probably a fair number of dudes who get a similar pressure to “accept their place” as the better.
For the benefit of a lot of asshole dudes being able to feel good about being assholes.
It’s part of why that block of assholes is really pushing back lately against progressive ideals. Because it’s a threat to the idea that “if you are a dude, you can just do it, it’s your place.” Especially as more and more men pull back and realize “I don’t have to be an asshole, I can respect others.”
It makes the assholes way way more obvious.
Men benefit from it. They benefit both from raping people with impunity and from being one of the good ones who doesn’t.
yup. meet my aunt. many years of pick me isms and trying to shame me for speaking out for the metoo movement.
she was kidnapped as a young woman in a foreign country. she says she survived the ordeal and was never afraid during the whole episode but since i have known her she was absolutely cruel , shaming any victim of rape, hoisting her opinions up on being a survivor looking down on everyone else
slowly… she found she couldnt stand to be alone anywhere. not even without a big dog.
then it got worse
fast forward decades later now she is in shambles struggling with that past trauma that manifested as severely crippling anxiety as she grows older and cant even be around more than a few people without having a massive emotional breakdown. the last one she ended up hospitalized. now isolated herself on an island, claiming shes just wanting ‘alone time’ and cant stand people.
doesnt hesitate to middle finger at any women who speak up about rape.
behold: the true ‘survivor’.
Thank you for your aunt’s story, it made me once again realise my levels of misanthropy aren’t healthy and I need yet another 100 hours of therapy.
I mean, you’re not wrong to have a certain view of men. It’s just that living in those feelings all the time is harmful.
Misanthropy is the general hate and/or distrust for the human species, not just men.
Sadly, things like this happen to victims of all kinds of abuse. When I was a kid, my father would sometimes tell me about things that his father did to him. Eventually I recognized that he had suffered horrible physical and verbal abuse. His father, in turn, had lived a life filled with trauma. Instead of dealing with it, he unloaded all his trauma onto his kids who then unloaded their inherited trauma onto their kids, including me.
When I began to recognize this dynamic, It was like I could see the little boy, within my dad, who just wanted to be loved but instead was systematically destroyed; through no fault of his own. His capacity for joy and love were greatly compressed, and the void filled with fear and anger. I saw that I was just like him and I was horrified at that discovery.
Sometimes people try to run away from the pain and fear. I think that’s why they try to pretend they’re above it. Because it feels easier to malign people who share your experience, in order to try and pretend it wasn’t real, than it is to face the pain and fear.
But until you face it, you will never escape it. It will always be there wreaking havoc on your life and lives of those around you.
this comment made me think a good bit
i’m so happy i’m breaking untold generational cycles of familial trauma and abuse by not having kids and ending my bloodline with myself
for everyone reading out there, there’s never anything wrong with cutting off shitty family if they deserve it. don’t let anyone guilt you into believing otherwise
“i went through it and turned out fine. If you went through it and became traumatized, it means you were weak. And I’m not weak, so I wasn’t traumatized”
Tale as old as time.
The law favors rapists. I realized a long time ago, just by women that I have known, that the statistics on rape are accurate and also low. I also realized that most men don’t understand that because they are not men who a woman would open up to about that. As for men who are worried about catching false charges, I would say that statistically you are more likely to get raped by another man than catch a fake charge. And because everything favors the rapist, he will probably get away with it.
As a man, I can confirm this. It took me being raped (and a few years of bottling it up to even consciously come to the realisation that I was indeed raped) to do away with nearly two decades of indirect conditioning by “lad culture” and mass media et al to see why it goes unreported most of the time.
(mind you I was raped by a woman, AND the same woman falsely accused me of rape, harassment, and a number of other awful things)
Yup, my watershed moment was when I found out my rapist had died. He was an older man who I had always brushed off as a bad teenage experiment. I didn’t even realize how much fear and anger I had for him, until I heard through the grapevine that he had died. Suddenly, I was staring at my Facebook feed, seeing some mutuals posting about his death, and had tears welling up in my eyes. Not tears of sadness, but of shame and anger.
It was simultaneously emancipating and also enraging. I suddenly knew he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else, and he wouldn’t be able to hurt me again… Until then, I hadn’t even realized I was worried about that. I had been carrying an immense amount of shame as a result of the “he has probably done this to others, and will probably do it again in the future” train of thought. Everyone says victims should report so their rapists can’t hurt others, right? And since he was an openly gay older guy, I statistically would have had a higher chance of being believed, right? But reporting would require telling others about what had happened, and I couldn’t even imagine doing that.
But I also knew that since he was dead, he would never see justice for what he did to me (and likely others before and after). He was very wealthy, very well-connected in my local area, and he died comfortably in his own bed. None of which he deserved. Knowing he would be feted his wake was absolutely enraging, because he only deserved a cardboard box underneath the local prison.
It was also what eventually led to me realizing why I had historically been so homophobic. I was born and raised in a conservative area, so homophobia is just par for the course here. But I eventually realized that I had been projecting my fear and anger of him whenever I saw a gay couple in public. And that what he did to me wasn’t their fault. I had also been externalizing a lot of my own shame. Nowadays I’m a staunch ally, but it would have been extremely easy for me to simply dig my heels in and refuse to do any soul-searching. I was definitely the older lady in this comic for longer than I would like to admit. And I have an immense amount of respect for the victims who do come forward, because I know what kind of determination that would take.
You are not alone in this brother. I was laughed out of my local police department when I attempted to file a report. I went back later when a woman officer was present and she took me seriously. Of course the court system was another story.
Thank you for sharing your story, I’m heartsick that you had to endure it. I can’t imagine the extra amount of scrutiny in this case for you.
There are so many of us, Velma. I feel like the number of unreported rapes of men is far higher than that of women. You, as a woman, have a much higher chance of being believed than I do as a man. Which is a fucked up statistic to quote. “Being believed”. But it remains true.
Edit: meaning theres probably way more rapes of women but proportionally, the report rate is probably way lower for men. Because we feel like no one will believe us.
Part of dismantling our rape culture is elevating men’s voices and stories as well. I want my son to know he’ll be supported and believed if anything happens to him. I want victims to have the support they need regardless of gender, age, and status.
It’s so fucked up the amount of prison rape jokes aimed at men, jokes about young boys getting lucky to have a woman teacher rape them, all of it. It harms boys and men as well as girls and women and everyone in between when we treat victims as if they asked to be raped or didn’t do enough to prevent it.
I’m in your corner. You have my unwavering support 💕
You seem to forget that small little detail of “innocent until proven guilty” which is thisbtiny corner stone of our society and probably the reason why you too are a free person
THAT detail is ehy rape is so hard to convict people on because ypy need yo prove that a sexual interaction was not consensual and thus rape
In few cases that is obvious and easy to prove, in most its impossible to prove, and thus the perpetrator goes free.
Now I get it, it sucks that the bad guy gets away with it, but the other option is that we start jailing innocent people. The entire idea of the justice system is not to put the guilty in jail but to keep the innocent out of jail. I am not about to give up on that.
Could be phrased better. I don’t know why you’re “correcting” them. It’s a lot of assumptions when you could assume they agree with you on this. It doesn’t really conflict.
We believe in innocent until proven guilty. That favors rapists.
The “innocent until proven guilty” threshold favours rapists in rape scenarios that look like consensual sex. It works pretty well for violent rapes, any rape that includes drugs, coerced inebriation, or assault on an unconscious person, any rape with corroborating witnesses at any key step, and any rape where there is a clear proof of refusal.
The problem is that this is only a fraction of rapes because many rapists avoid physical violence preferring “the implication” of violence instead. They also prey on victims who have low self esteem or a weak sense of what’s okay because they grew up in rape culture. These scenarios are very hard to meet the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” because other than the victim testimony, which is often unclear and confused, there isn’t other proof. And if you start with a victim with low experience and low self esteem and you isolate them get them drunk and rape them the victims testimony is guaranteed to be unclear and confused. That’s why this scenario is so common in the first place.
But the most important aspect by far, and one we can actually point to easily with proof, is that the police, prosecutors, and judges are often extremely pro-rape culture delegitimizing victims and coddling rapists. The number of cases that ended with a slap on the wrists because “we don’t want to ruin this promising young man’s life over 5 minutes of [inserts your favorite delegitimizing euphemism here]” is just staggering". This is why the system favours rapists in a way changing laws or standards won’t solve.
If we don’t want to live in a country of old rapists and pedophiles, we’re going to have to become more comfortable running the lives of young rapists and pedophiles.
I would avoid saying that the law favours rapists in general (though it might where you live) because it makes it sound as if it’s a problem that can be fixed if we bring in the right legislation. The problem as I see it is that the people who administer the law favour rapists, and that’s a much more intractable problem.
When I was about 5 my then 3 year old sister was sexually abused by our adoptive mother’s husband at the time. I don’t really have a good memory, but I understand that I was drugged and maybe also messed with too. They took my sis to the hospital and confirmed the abuse took place.
The dude got a slap on the wrist, honestly. A few years jail (I think?) and a divorce - leaving behind a single mother on a teacher’s salary with 2 kids that he doesn’t even owe child support for. They both made the decision to adopt and he just got right out of any responsibility for that.
For us as kids, it meant lots of talking to professionals who barely got anything out of us. I mean, we were afraid. All we had was each other in the whole world and it seemed like we couldn’t even trust our own parents, so what do we do? Instead we grew up with little faith in family and no faith in a “God” who turned their back or a country who didn’t give a damn.
You did nothing wrong. You’re not alone. You don’t have to suffer in silence. Tell your story. You never know who might really need to hear it.
![Realization [PizzaCake]](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/58eacea0-b255-4a2d-b579-35265a7cffee.png){kind=link}