26th Mar 2008
Raped - sure she was asking for it
Sure she was asking for it….
The shocking news today is that one in four people in Ireland think women who are raped are somehow responsible for it. The Red Sea Poll in today’s Irish Examiner finds:
* More than 30% think a victim is some way responsible if she flirts with a man or fails to say no clearly.
* 10% of people think the victim is entirely at fault if she has had a number of sexual partners.
* 37% think a woman who flirts extensively is at least complicit, if not completely in the wrong, if she is the victim of a sex crime.
* One in three think a woman is either partly or fully to blame if she wears revealing clothes.
* 38% believe a woman must share some of the blame if she walks through a deserted area.
The results also show that defence barristers, looking to swing the deciding three members in every 12-person jury, can exploit misgivings in certain demographics about the perceived responsibility of female victims.
Dramatic differences in empathy towards victims based on age and social class are revealed. Gender, however, had little impact.
In every category, widowed, divorced and separated people took the harshest view on the role of the female victim, compared with married or cohabiting couples.
The results of the poll support the results of the ground-breaking Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report in 2002, which found 15% of the population believed a raped woman was not an innocent victim.
The SAVI report, which was published in partnership with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, also found 6% of women were raped at some point as adults.
I have no doubt attitudes in the North of Ireland are the same. In a day when the Irish News reports that women in NI can expect to earn £9k less then their male colleagues it is clear there is still a mountain to climb in terms of gender equality.
As the great saying goes: “I’ll be a post feminist in post patriarchy.”
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