If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.
When people scoff at the message that we need to teach people not to rape they make the assumption that the lesson goes: “Rape is bad. Don’t do it.” That is not what the lesson looks like. The lesson, once it is adopted, will be that every single person out there, regardless of any defining personal characteristics, is a human being of value, and with a right to make their own decisions about what bodily contact to have with others. There is nothing a person can do that makes them less deserving of that right. Violating any person’s right to control the when, what and who with of their sexual interactions is wrong. Do it and you will be punished, and you will deserve it.
N.B. While not all those who are raped are women, and not all rapists are men, much less rape apologists; rape prevention myths are always targeted at women, and this post reflects this. My language in the final paragraph is very consciously gender-neutral.
Hoyden In Exile 
“Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice.”
Then the complaint would be, ‘What was she doing there knowing it was a place men went to drink alcohol?’
When my daughter was 13 they had a rape prevention section in health class. The lesson (the only lesson on rape prevention) was that girls should say “no”. My daughter was upset, so I read the assignment. Not only was the lesson only meant for girls, but they were instructed on the “right” way to say no with examples. One girl was too passive, so it was “reasonable” that the boy didn’t understand. One girl was too mean in rejecting unwanted advances, so everyone hated her. Perfect girl said “no” in just the right way; polite, sensitive, but clear. I kid you not. I live in a supposedly liberal town, and none of the parents that I talked to could see a problem with the lesson. They thought it was very useful. It was a tough year.
Hi midorime, here’s a link debunking that rubbish, with reference to actual science…
I notice in the Steubenville reactions, there are (at least) two different levels of victim blaming: the people who agree the perpetrators did indeed commit rape, but still think Jane Doe should have done something differently; and the people who, as far as I can tell, think rape is only the stranger-leaping-from-behind-the-bushes variety, and the perpetrators just got tangled up in messy legal definitions that were never meant to apply to drunken parties.
It’s a long, hard road to convince the world at large that everyone has (or should have) bodily autonomy.
Thats the approach taken with home security. Your house just needs to be more secure than the one next door so thieves rob that one instead. It’s basically the advice that insurance companies give out (and reward homeowners with lower premiums for compliance) too.
We can make more of an effort on the education front with rape to tell people not to rape, but how well do we expect it to work? We certainly tell children not to steal from an early age but have no shortage of thieves.
@Chris – well they tried it in Canada and it reduced sexual assault by 10% apparently .
angharad – that sounds like it’s worth doing then!
As hesitant as I am about getting into another let’s-compare-women-with-material-possessions conversation, I think we can be fairly confident that there would be a whole lot more thieves than there are if we never taught children that they have no right to take things that belong to someone else.
And that may be the attitude to home security taken by insurance companies, but it is not the attitude of police or the judicial system. Someone gets caught robbing a house, they go down for robbing a house, regardless of the home security system. Whereas we have seen countless instances of rapist going free on the grounds that the victim did not protect herself adequately.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23safetytipsforladies
Listening to teachers’ descriptions of classrooms where kids were assuming that sex was ok if the girl didn’t say “no” brought home a weird realization: every rape prevention message/poster I remember from college was along the idea “no means no,” not “sex missing consent is rape.” At some point teenage children are getting drunk for the first time, and we haven’t yet pounded the right rules into their heads.
Perhaps paired lessons on rape for young kids: in a civics class — you will be punished badly, and sex-ed — focused on human dignity.
Stephen, that’s a very important point – ‘no means no’ is not a standalone – it has to be placed within the framework of meaningful consent.
YetAnotherMatt, thanks for the links to the #safetytipsforladies hashtag – that’s gold.
Stephen, I think you’re right, and it’s tremendously sad that both prongs are needed. It would be nice if the human dignity line was enough, but the absence of a “you will be caught, you will be held accountable” message from the authorities (in line with the typical response to other forms of crime) is painfully obvious.
And yes, #safetytipsforladies is a delight, that makes me think we may have reached maximum exasperation point.