Let us go home: The path out of rape culture

[Trigger warning for rape and sexual assault.]

The sexual assaults of two women in Wellington in 24 hours over Easter weekend prompted two strains of anger: one targeted and able to be acted on – and the other, frustratingly, neither.

The first, aimed at Victoria University, the city council and police, sought to place blame for a failed duty of care. Concerns about the remote, poorly-lit pathway around the Boyd Wilson field – flippantly dubbed “Rape Alley” by some residents of the Te Puni hall of residence, for whom it is the most direct route home from town – had been ignored for years, even after an attack in the area one month prior.

The second pulled focus, Powers of Ten-style, to bring into view all of Wellington, New Zealand, the world, until it was so all-encompassing as to be almost meaningless: an impotent force of rage responding to no one failure by an individual or institution, but all of society.

Because the April attacks weren’t the result of inadequate lighting, or overgrown bushes, or the failure of the uni to do x or the council y, or even that women were walking along the path after dark alone and often drunk.

The problem was – still is – that women are taught to protect themselves from sexual assault, rather than men, not to commit it. And that’s the result of attitudes and behaviours so insidious and ingrained in our culture, they’re hard to identify, let alone change.

It’s no wonder that preventing sexual assault tends to be discussed in terms of self-defence workshops and security cameras. But people commit sexual assault, not pathways, and to believe otherwise is to buy into “rape culture”, where women are told not to drink too much, or walk by themselves, or wear too short skirts, or else risk becoming a victim.

A month after the attacks – when the climate of fear on campus had more or less passed, even though the offender had not been caught – more than 300 students marched down the Boyd Wilson path to protest rape culture. Afterwards, many stayed on to workshop potential solutions and strategies at a forum at the Aro Valley Community Centre.

Organiser Madeleine Ashton-Martyn, 20, said at the event that the aim was to picture what such a cultural shift might look like, as well as to flag specific places on campus or in Wellington where people had felt unsafe.

She was disappointed that the response to the attacks had focused on changing potential victims’ behaviour, be it by keeping their phone charged or walking home with friends. “There was kind of a turning point in the responses I was reading where I was like, ‘We got so close, but we didn’t quite make it’. … There wasn’t a direct way of saying, ‘Actually, let’s make this an opportunity to target rape culture’.”

She struggles with the trade-offs she has to make as a young woman living in a rape culture, she said. “Every time I put my keys between my fingers, I feel really angry … We shouldn’t have to do these things, but while we live in this environment, it’s about keeping yourself safe.

“It’s horrible … but it will change. I have confidence in that.”

Speaking a few weeks after the march, students’ association president Sonya Clark describes it as a success. “But it’s fair to say that many students weren’t there, and the issue is how we get them to understand what rape culture is and how we change it.”

She believes the entire university community, from the Vice-Chancellor down, has a responsibility to lead on the wider issue of reversing rape culture – and that the April attacks provided an opportunity to do so.

“As students we have to be a part of creating that social change that we want, especially on our own campuses,” she says. “We need to focus on the attitudes and beliefs in our own community, because that’s where change starts from.

“It’s an overwhelming task. Everything is part of the answer, but when you’re walking home, just getting from A to B, it seems like the whole conversation is really hard to have.”

WATCH: Sonya Clark and Rick Zwaan of Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association outline the changes made to the Boyd Wilson path in the wake of the April attacks.

Clark was a somewhat reluctant talking head on the issue in media coverage of the attacks, and recounts uncomfortably how she asked a reporter not to use the nickname for the path, “Rape Alley”.

“It’s the trivial element to it, making it a normal part of life, like, ‘Oh, rape happens there’,” she says. “That’s rape culture. That’s what it felt like.”

Even now, she chooses her words carefully for fear of “saying the wrong thing” and provoking the ire of the “feminist community, offering qualifiers at every turn:

The onus should be on offenders, not victims, to prevent sexual assault – but it’s reasonable for women to want to protect themselves.

Better lighting, more cameras, walking with friends won’t solve the issue – but it can contribute to their feeling safe in their community.

Focusing on these attacks distracts from the reality that the overwhelming majority of sexual offenders are known to their victims – but it’s an opportunity to address wider rape culture.

“And at the same time, we want to talk about the issue, and educate people about it, without making them more fearful in their own community,” says Clark, looking, for a moment, entirely defeated.

If the conversation feels like it’s going round in circles, it’s testament to the thorniness of the issue, not any tautology on Clark’s part. She points out that she’s a stakeholder still grappling with the realities of the situation herself.

“I find it really hard that, as young women, we’re often berated for not behaving a certain way, when that’s exactly the point: we shouldn’t have to,” she says. “But we also live in a society where we do have to act that way. That’s quite hard to explain to someone. It shouldn’t be hard, but it is.”

The fraught dialogue around sexual assault doesn’t make it easier. While Clark stresses, again and again, victims are never to blame, leaving it at that is perhaps not productive. “It’s important to unpack this concept of a rape culture and discuss it, but then someone will go, ‘But the offender causes it’. Yes, but the way we talk about assault is really problematic.”

Nevertheless, the conversation often stalls there, with solutions or strategies aimed at anyone other than perpetrators dismissed as victim-blaming.

Last year, Slate.com advice columnist Emily Yoffe attracted widespread criticism for arguing, in the wake of several high-profile cases on US college campuses, that “the best rape prevention” was to tell “women to stop getting so wasted”. (The moot her opinion piece inspired at a debating championship hosted by Victoria University was received similarly poorly.)

Victims are never responsible for their assault; to argue otherwise empowers offenders, and perpetuates rape culture. And yet there’s an uneasy tension between acknowledging that as fact, and the very reasonable desire to do all that you can to protect yourself from harm.

But there’s no science or strategy to reducing your chances of being a victim of sexual assault, says Eleanor Butterworth, agency manager of Wellington Rape Crisis.

“If you’re not the one breaking the law, changing your behaviour doesn’t help – there are no fewer harmful people in the world,” she says. “Maybe an individual has managed to dodge something, but even then, it’s just a guess, and it puts the spotlight on the wrong part of the problem.”

With about three-quarters [pdf] of sexual assaults in New Zealand occurring in a familiar environment, and the offenders known to or identifiable by 92 per cent of victims, assaults like those that occurred on the Boyd Wilson path can distract from the extent of the problem.

“People can take all of the supposed steps for safety – they can be sober, with others, not out late – and they can still be raped, in their house, by their partner,” says Butterworth.

As Tom Meagher, the husband of Jill Meagher, who was raped and murdered by Adrian Bayley in Melbourne in 2012, wrote of the danger of “the monster-rapist narrative”:

Bayley feeds into a commonly held social myth that most men who commit rape are like him, violent strangers who stalk their victims and strike at the opportune moment. It gives a disproportionate focus to the rarest of rapes, ignoring the catalogue of non-consensual sex happening on a daily basis everywhere on the planet.

As such, any individual attempts to prevent sexual assault don’t get to the heart of the problem, says Butterworth. She’s dismissive of the narrative that all sexual offenders are acting on an innate impulse or are unaware of the harm they cause, pointing to the success in the UK of the Stop It Now helpline for people concerned about their attraction to children. “At an individual level, prevention looks like if you have sexually harmful behaviour, getting help to deal with it.”

But one of the biggest hurdles in the bid to end rape culture is the gulf between people who are already versed in the concept, and mainstream society – and just how far we have to go has been painfully obvious in the past month. Tanya Billingsley’s calls on the Government calls to address rape culture [pdf] have been either met with hostility or scepticism, or dismissed out of hand. Labour leader David Cunliffe was ridiculed for apologising for “the bullshit, deep-seated sexism” and violence perpetrated by his gender. And though the so-called “Roast Busters” – who opened the nation’s eyes to the scope of the problem – are no longer in the headlines, the impact of their crimes is still felt deeply by their victims.

That’s where public displays against rape culture like the VUWSA march have real value, says Butterworth. “It creates a space for people to talk about sexual violence that otherwise would not have existed, and provides an accessible in, and that’s part of moving our society on. Sexual and domestic violence are issues that you chip away at, not solve with a single campaign.”

There’s a catchcry amongst those working to bring about change that just as rape culture damages everyone, we all stand to gain by ending it. That will happen over time, with more widespread understanding and education, an open dialogue, and greater equality between the sexes – but it starts out small, and close to home.

Research suggests most rapes are committed by a small group of predators who claim a large number of victims, which means there’s very real potential for the people present in environments where there’s an increased risk – like bars and halls of residence – to make a difference.

“There’s never going to be a shortage of people to victimise,” says Hayley Adams, 23, co-ordinator of the Who Are You? Safer Bars Project in Wellington. “The only way to stop it, other than moving it somewhere else, is to address the perpetrator’s behaviour and the community’s response to that.”

The goal of Who Are You? is to highlight the role of people on the periphery in preventing potential sexual assault, and equip them with the knowledge and language necessary to intervene. (The Ministry of Social Development’s ‘Are You That Someone?’ campaign is unrelated, but has a similar message.)

Adams – a law graduate, currently in the process of applying to join the police force – says the culture of most bars doesn’t exactly facilitate the calling out of predatory or aggressive behaviour. “It’s awful – if you say, ‘Stop it, I don’t like what you’re doing’, the response is ‘Lighten up, stop being such a prude’.”

Who Are You? aims to bring about a shift in the attitudes of both bar staff and patrons. “A lot of people say that’s asking too much, but ten years ago, if you drank too much at a bar and you went to get in your car, it would have been totally unacceptable for the barman to walk outside and take your keys. Now that happens all the time.”

Preventing sexual violence doesn’t necessarily mean pushing two people away from each other; it can just be calling someone out on a shitty comment they’ve made

The project is still in its pilot stage, with training for staff of a handful of Wellington bars scheduled next month. But Adams is hopeful that if it’s a success, it could be incorporated in city councils’ local alcohol policies, or even made part of the licencing process for duty managers.

As daunting as it is to try to change an entire culture, she points out that prevention is at “the happy end of this sort of work” – and that everyone’s able to contribute positively to the effort. There are still people in their 20s, 30s, even 40s who don’t understand consent, she says, and who are genuinely unaware that their behaviour is inappropriate.

That means it’s important to have entry-level conversations about what rape culture is, and how we can change it. “You have that knee-jerk reaction where everyone thinks of the worst-case scenario,” she says. “But preventing sexual violence doesn’t necessarily mean running in at the moment of contact and pushing two people away from each other; it can just be calling someone out on a shitty comment they’ve made.”

But dismantling an entire culture, shitty comment by shitty comment, will take time, personnel and resources, and especially of groups short of all three. Though there’s change afoot in individual conversations and communities, the grim reality is that it takes high-profile incidents like those on the Boyd Wilson path to start a dialogue about the wider issue, and for the movement to gain momentum.

That attacker, meanwhile, has not been caught.

Cover image of Sonya Clark by Margot Mills / VUWSA.