Why victim-blaming must end

If the recent Banani rape case has brought anything to light, it is that a sizable portion of our population suffers from a severe victim-blaming mentality. It is baffling that the first question most people chose to ask in response to the Banani rape incident was, "what were these girls doing in a hotel at 2 a.m. with unrelated guys in the first place?" instead of asking the real question: "why do men rape?"

Coming from a deeply patriarchal society, the first thing we consciously or subconsciously ask about a rape incident is the extent to which the victim herself can be held responsible for her own rape, especially when the perpetrator was not a complete stranger. We do this by qualifying the status of victimhood by imposing an "ideal victim" standard, a term coined by a Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie. He defined the ideal or "perfect" victim as "a person or category of individuals who…most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim" ("From Crime Policy to Victim Policy", ed. Ezzat Fattah, Macmillan: London, 1986). Rape victims who do not conform to this standard (by for instance, transgressing what we perceive to be the ideal role of women in society and public life) are victim-blamed and largely denied the status of victimhood. An example of who would be considered an ideal victim in our culture is a woman who only leaves the house during the day, out of necessity, while modestly dressed and preferably with a male guardian. In imposing this standard, we end up asking immaterial questions about the victim when we should instead be inquiring about the rapist(s). Who was she with? What was she doing? What was she wearing? Why was she there in the first place? In other words: did the woman do all she could to avoid getting raped or did she essentially bring it on herself?

Tonu was readily granted the victim status since she was out during the day in the safest part of Dhaka to attend classes and was wearing the hijab. In the Banani rape case, however, the two victims failed to meet the ideal victim standard by attending a birthday party of unrelated males wearing "western clothing", that too, so late at night. Therefore, these victims were victim-blamed along the following lines:

There are those who instinctively questioned the girls' decision to be at a late night party to begin with and use that as a reason to blame the girls. They justify their position by drawing ridiculous and insulting analogies along the lines of: "if you walk in to the cage of a tiger, do not be surprised if it leaps on you". Because apparently, a man's urge to rape is akin to an uncontrollable animal instinct which women must be careful not to provoke and so they must always consider the possibility of getting raped before they have the audacity to run off to something as perilous as a birthday party.

Of course, victim-blaming would be left incomplete without the token self-righteous male chauvinists parading their unabashed misogyny in the guise of misinformed religiosity. Even though rape is one of the gravest sins in Islam, punishable by a mandatory death sentence, these people chose to give the rapists a free pass and decided to moral police the rape victims instead.

Embedded within this line of thinking is the notion that rape is an almost inevitable calamity which is bound to happen if women live their lives in the "wrong way". As such, it is women themselves who have the sole responsibility of taking sufficient precautionary measures to prevent being raped. In other words, society at large would rather tell women "please, do not get raped" instead of telling their precious male offspring: "for the love of basic humanity, do not rape".

Worse yet is the fact that an alarmingly high number of women themselves victim-blame those women who have been raped but did not meet the ideal victim standard. Perhaps they do so as a means to distance themselves from an unpleasant occurrence and therefore affirm their own invulnerability to that particular risk (Rape Culture, Victim Blaming and The Facts, Connecticut Sexual Assault Services, 2016). By blaming the victim of causing the rape to happen by her own actions, they can view the victim as being different from themselves. They reassure themselves by thinking, "I would never go to such a place at such a time wearing such a dress, so this would never happen to me."

This is not to say that we should abstain from encouraging girls to make wise choices in a country which has manifestly proven itself to be grossly incapable of guaranteeing their basic safety. However, to do so in retrospect, in response to a rape case, by analysing a victim's decisions, does not count as 'advice' or stating 'common sense'. It is insensitive, untimely and simply a form of victim-blaming, which must stop. When a bunch of boys have committed something as heinous as gang raping two girls at gunpoint, in what sense is the victims' lifestyle choices more worthy of our scrutiny? By shaming the victim and blaming her for her own rape, we end up normalising rape and perpetuate an insidious rape culture. Victim blaming is a dangerous red-herring which deflects the blame and focus from the heinous acts of the rapists, to that of the victims, at a time when it should be clear which of the two is more deserving of the blame.

This damaging thought pattern causes victims to blame themselves for their own ordeal in the aftermath of rape. And then these same victim-blamers have the gall to question why the rape victims "took so long" to report their case instead of "going to the police right away" and then use this time-lag to further discredit the genuineness of the victims' claims. They do so in complete ignorance of the fact that rape victims undergo severe physical and mental trauma that they must first overcome before they can file a case. Moreover, rape victims have to contemplate whether filing a case would, in fact, be worth the (misplaced) social stigma which they would be on the receiving end of as soon as they make their rape known. Little wonder then that the vast majority of rape cases remain unreported. Until this culture of victim-blaming ends, victims of rape simply will not have the courage to file their cases within a prompt time-frame, after which, the key medical evidences permanently disappear, making it that much more difficult to prove their case in court. It is high time we learned to accept that a woman should not have to be a saint in order to qualify as a rape victim — she need only be forced to have sexual intercourse without her consent.

The writer is a trainee-advocate at Chancery Chambers in Bangladesh and a legal volunteer at the Bangladesh Society for the Enforcement of Human Rights (BSEHR - Manabadhikar).