Thank-you!  Boy oh boy this is a loaded question, but I am happy to answer it!

A few days ago I made a post opening up about being molested at the age of 9 by someone I knew. (You can read that right here!)  Like any victim, I wasn’t asking for what happened to me.  It wasn’t my fault.  But the response that I received when I finally brought it out in the open — having my experience trivialized by my own mother (and by other people after that, including a therapist and close friend) for not being the right “type” of victim… to me, that felt just as bad as the experience itself.  It killed me.  

Rape culture means taking the blame away from the perpetrator of the crime.  It’s saying that “boys will be boys” and women just have to deal with the “fact” that men can’t control themselves when a pretty girl walks by.    It’s excusing a crime and instead pinning it on a girl for her own actions.  

It’s not illegal for a girl to be drunk, to wear skimpy clothes, to act a certain way.  It is illegal to rape.  So why is it that, during the VERY few times that a woman actually reports her rape, she is the one who is questioned, and treated like a criminal?   I don’t understand why this has become such a widely accepted idea, and that’s why I’m so passionate , I want to try to educate people that this is wrong.  

When I was younger, I was ignorant and misinformed.  I thought it was a woman’s responsibility to keep herself from getting raped.  I had been fed this idea that men are incapable of controlling themselves, that rape is about some sort of lust provoked by what a girl wears, and that if women are really as sensible as we claim to be, we ought to just suck it up and restrict ourselves.  Now I’m twenty and I realize how wrong this is.  It’s not a girl’s responsibility to not get raped — it’s a person’s responsibility to not rape.  

I just want to start seeing some accountability.

Thanks so much for your message, anon. <3