Blaming the victim is a shameful act
**Joanna Lumley featured in the Telegraph recently declaring that young girls ought to “stop behaving badly and take more responsibility for their actions”, which she claims “leave them vulnerable to rape”. **
She continued to lambast youth culture for encouraging drunkenness and by extension rape, even going so far as associating girls in ‘silly dresses’ with being taken advantage of.
Once again perpetuating the notion that accountability for sexual assault lies with the victim; that it is somehow their lack of vigilance, awareness, or clothes that brought on the attack and that somehow victims have control over the aggressive desires and intentions of a perpetrator.
As well as being utterly ridiculous, Lumley also makes this debate about class – urging young women to be more elegant and less ‘white trash’. I don’t condone the kind of culture where young girls place greater importance on vanity than intelligence but, nevertheless, wearing make-up and tottering around in heels shouldn’t automatically invite men to leer at them or think they stand any more chance of getting laid.
Nor should it suggest that this is a lower class activity and that by pearling it up and looking more like Kate Middleton do women stand any less chance of being vulnerable to attack.
Let’s set the record straight; whether you’re wearing a bin bag or miniskirt, if you don’t consent to sexual intercourse, it is rape and it is not your fault.
I realise ‘national treasure’ Lumley is imploring women to protect themselves and to try and be smarter in situations where assault is a possibility, but instead she is entrenching our society’s tendency to teach ‘don’t get raped’, rather than ‘don’t rape’ and reinforcing the gender binary that it is about the way women act, rather than the way men think. It is about consent, not modesty.
And quite frankly it’s a tiresome and detrimental belief that women possess responsibility for avoiding criminality. Indeed, what society is telling victims of rape is that it’s their fault for leaving their body on show, much in the same way you might be chastised for keeping valuable possessions in sight in your car.
Whilst the victim is practically always stereotyped as a reckless, scantily-dressed young girl, the perpetrator remains an unknown mystery. A person of indeterminate age whose roving eye was merely caught by that shameful thing known as the mini-skirt, who could hardly help but take up the opportunity to capitalise upon her attention-seeking behaviour.
This is something else that ought to be clarified; just because one chooses to wear something that displays their body, it does not give anyone the right to objectify or take ownership of that body.
Lumley goes on to tell young women “to behave properly and be polite”; as if getting raped means they were behaving improperly.
I am honestly staggered. A figure as well-known and cherished as Joanna Lumley, to whom many people no doubt listen or look up to, should know better than to slut-shame or victim-blame.
And we should do better than to follow her example.
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