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Some thoughts on ending rape

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Recently, I started noticing references in my Twitter feed to a Twitter account called @EndingRape. The account belongs to a man named Richard Hart, who has a Web site and book called Keep Your Daughter Safe.

Now, I don’t think Richard Hart is a bad guy. I don’t think he’s evil or malicious. I think he probably sincerely believes that rape is a Bad Thing and he probably genuinely wants a world with less of it.

But his approach is deeply troubling, and in some cases even destructive, for a number of reasons.

The most obvious problem with Mr. Hart’s approach is that it focuses on women, and on listing things that women shouldn’t do if they don’t want to get raped. His Twitter feed is a litany of thou-shalt-nots for women:

The problem with these “tips” is that they shift the responsibility of preventing rape onto the potential victim. This opens the door to all sorts of victim-blaming behavior (“You walked down the street alone and you were raped? Well, what did you expect would happen?). By placing the burden of responsibility on a victim to avoid a crime rather than on a perpetrator to not commit a crime, we end up, whether we want to or not, creating two classes of victims: those who did what they were supposed to do (and if they get raped anyway, it’s not their fault, they followed the script) and those who didn’t do what they were supposed to do (and therefore bear some of the blame for what happened).

Mr. Hart says in his Twitter feed that rape is the responsibility of the rapist, not the victim; he claims that he isn’t engaging in victim blaming behavior:

But this brings up a troubling aspect to telling women it’s their responsibility to avoid rape: If we accept the notion that women should do these things in order to avoid being victims, what we’re really saying is “women, make sure some OTHER woman is assaulted.” Essentially, we’re saying that rape is inevitable, rapists target the low-hanging fruit, so women should avoid being that low-hanging fruit and let someone else be targeted.

In his Twitter profile, Mr. Hart says he is “committed to ending rape and sexual assault in America.” This is not possible if we address only what women do. His tweet saying “there will always be rapists” belies his claim that he wants to end rape and sexual assault.

The title of his book is especially telling. It’s called Keep Your Daughter Safe, and it suggests to me that his goal isn’t actually to end rape in America; it’s to make sure that his family members–people he cares about–aren’t victims of rape.

This is, fundamentally, a monkeysphere issue. He doesn’t actually want to end rape; he wants to end rape for people inside his monkeysphere–people he has an emotional investment in. It’s okay if his advice means that some other woman is targeted; there will always be bad people, after all, so the way to end rape among women he cares about is to give them an easier target to go after.

If we are actually to be sincere in our desires to end rape in America, at some point we must step outside of our own personal monkeyspheres. We must address that the end of rape will never come by telling women what to do; it can only come–it must only come–by addressing the causes of rape. Violence, anger, misogyny, rape culture, a perception of entitlement to sexual access to women’s bodies–these are the things we have to talk about if we are seriously to make progress on ending rape.

But these things are hard. Harder than telling women to keep the door locked and don’t walk alone. And they won’t fit in 140 characters.


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