When news broke that deputy principal Cherith Telford at Henderson High School in New Zealand told female students that their uniform skirts must be knee-length to "keep our girls safe, stop boys from getting ideas and create a good work environment for male staff," reactions were mixed. Singer Erykah Badu felt that the girls had no business wearing skirts that stopped above their knees to school, while actress Reagan Gomez argued that it wasn't the responsibility of the girls to avoid being a temptation to grown men.
The idea that clothing has anything to do with assault is global and persistent. In 1999 the Supreme Court of Appeals in Rome ruled that a woman wearing jeans couldn't be raped, reasoning that a rapist couldn't forcibly remove a pair of pants. Police question victims of sexual assault about what they were wearing, as though the length of their skirt is an indication of consent. Members of the Missouri legislature responded to reports of increasing sexual harassment with plans to enforce more modest dress codes, as though the problem is a 19-year-old's first business suit and not the 50-year-old who's using his power over an intern inappropriately. In 2005, Amnesty International polled Britons and found that as many as a third of respondents believed women were partially responsible for being assaulted because of attire and behavior.
It's a common argument that invariably boils down to the same nonsense: If the victims were different, they wouldn't have been victimized. It's a comforting myth, guaranteed to make it easy to pretend that sexual assault is something that only happens to people who make bad choices. It's also a myth that has been thoroughly debunked by the Justice Department, RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) and many other organizations. A Federal Commission on Crime of Violence study found that just 4.4 percent of all reported rapes involved "provocative behavior" on the part of the victim. (In murder cases, it's 22 percent.) It also found that most convicted rapists could not remember what their victims were wearing. Studies show that women with passive personalities, who tend to dress in layers, long pants and sleeves and high necklines, are actually more likely to be raped. In one study, 1 in 3 college men said that they would force someone to have sex if they could get away with it, and that has nothing to do with clothing.
We know that anyone from a nun to a soldier can be a victim of sexual assault, including men. In fact, while everything from attire to alcohol consumption is blamed when women are raped, military sexual assault statistics show that men in the military are at a slightly greater risk of sexual assault than women. Now either the three-piece military uniforms and combat boots are leading people astray, or clothing has nothing to do with what makes rapists assault people. The sad reality is that rapists choose to rape, often more than once, and studies show they are also often guilty of other violent crimes.
The cultural assumption that rape is something that can be prevented by behaving a certain way has never been extended to include male victims. While some of those assaults are characterized as hazing or bullying, the reality is that we don't assume male victims are at fault for existing near a rapist. (Male victims face other damaging notions, like the idea that men cannot be raped or that men enjoy the sexual attention of older, predatory women. Both of these incredibly dangerous ideas makes men less likely to report an attack and should be challenged, along with the idea that women can hope to avoid rape only by not being tempting.)
Despite the fact that nine percent of sexual assault victims are young men, we don't insist that they dress differently. We don't warn young men not to tempt their teachers with their bare biceps, knees or other body parts. We don't warn young men not to be a distraction to their female classmates or regulate whether they can wear shorts in the summer to school. When a news story breaks about an adult female teacher preying sexually on a boy, no one asks what he was wearing or insists he should have known better than to be alone with her. So what's the point of policing skirt lengths, of advising young women not to go to certain places, to protect their drinks instead of focusing on telling rapists not to rape?
Women who express their fear of being assaulted as a reason to avoid strange men on the street are often chided for thinking that "all men are rapists." And indeed, studies show that a small percentage of men are responsible for most sexual assaults. But the anti-rape campaigns that are put forward on campuses, in the military and elsewhere focus on the idea that the only way a woman can be safe from sexual assault is to change her behavior, to change her attire, to never do anything that could potentially increase her risk of being a victim. There's an assumption that rapists are just one of those unavoidable aspects of life, and the onus is on women, who make up 91 percent of victims, to insulate themselves.
Now, if only six percent of men are rapists, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on changing the behavior of the smaller population? To have anti-rape campaigns that focus on teaching not only what constitutes sexual assault but that actively teach not to be a rapist? Wouldn't it make sense for schools to focus on training teachers not to see their vulnerable young charges as potential sexual partners? After all, the only one in control of whether a sexual assault is attempted is the perpetrator.
If a teacher can be tempted into inappropriate behavior because of the skin just above a girl's knee, then the problem isn't the knee, the problem is the teacher. And if our culture insists on perpetuating the lie that clothing leads to rape, despite all evidence to the contrary, then the problem is our culture.
Editorial on 04/24/2016