There is nothing more embarrassing than watching bigotry flopping around trying to save itself while the tide of history retreats down the beach. Yet another week has passed in which high-profile politicians and entertainers were all over the papers, being fingered for rape and sexual violence. Some people are asking, with an air of annoyance, as if they were tired of all the fuss: how many more revelations will there be?
The question is chillingly rhetorical. We know, really, that the answer is many, many more. This isn’t just about ten, or 40, or 100 dodgy individuals. It’s not just about Jimmy Savile, or Stuart Hall, or the BBC, or the Socialist Workers Party, or two American highschoolers crying in court, or three young women chained in a basement in Ohio, or one dead girl at a hospital in India. Over the past year, an enormous, global shift has begun to take place around questions of consent, rape and violence against women, and it’s a cultural shift for which our institutions are clearly underprepared.
Some members of those institutions have responded with panicked self-justification. We didn’t know, we thought it was allowed, we weren’t there, we didn’t see, they’re all lying sluts anyway and should stop whingeing and playing the victim. Take the lawyer Barbara Hewson, who claimed in Spiked that the real problem is that child protection agencies are trying to profit from changing definitions of victimhood, and that the victims are the “old men” who are being unfairly scapegoated for a bit of jolly dressing-room lechery. I do not “support the persecution of old men”, as Hewson manipulatively puts it, but I abso – lutely support the prosecution of rapists, and so should you.
Hewson is far from the only one to plead for tolerance on behalf of the intolerable. Men such as Hall and Savile lived in a different time, their detractors claim, a time when shoving your fist with impunity up the skirt of any passing schoolgirl was just the gift you got for being born with a set of testicles. Said detractors often speak of this time with the same kitschy nostalgia usually reserved for the village green, toasted teacakes and casual racism: life was just easier back then, for some of us, at least. Elderly rapists and abusers didn’t know what they were doing, so how can they be blamed?
This defence, which is rather insulting to the significant and growing number of males who absolutely do respect women enough not to shove their hands and penises inside them without asking, is also wheeled out on behalf of the many men, young and old, who are suddenly being exposed as rapists and abusers even though they might never have heard of Jimmy Savile. “They didn’t know they were doing anything wrong.”
It was the same defence used in March when two American high-schoolers in Steu – benville, Ohio, were convicted of raping an unconscious girl over several hours and capturing the evidence on cameraphones: these poor young men, local-hero players in their town’s high-school football team, didn’t know they were committing a crime. Now their futures are ruined. Perhaps the girl in question should have kept her mouth shut? Perhaps the countless thousands of victims of rape and abuse should do the same, now and for ever? Perhaps we should remember who the true victims are in this situation – grown men and their erections, mercilessly victimised by wanton teenagers who continue to have the brazen temerity to exist.
That these men felt they were doing nothing wrong is precisely the problem. For centuries, men in positions of power were untouchable, while women and children were anything but. One could not call a man of Savile’s or Hall’s kind to account for his actions and expect to be taken seriously. One could not accuse a popular sportsman of rape and expect justice. These things went on, but they went on in silence, with the complicity of quiet armies of flunkies and facilitators.
The reason that these “old men” are being prosecuted (sorry, “persecuted”) right now is simple. They are being prosecuted because their victims are coming forward, and their victims are finally coming forward because society has reached a tipping point when it comes to rape culture. The idea that people who are raped must have provoked it in some way is at last being questioned.
The most important attitude change is going to take place not among abusers, but among the far larger contingent that simply stands by and lets it happen. Among the people who have been taught, or who have learned from hard experience, that these things are merely part of the tissue of power in this society – actions that are perhaps not strictly moral, but aren’t worth taking the risk of speaking out about. The victims are only women, after all, and they were probably asking for it. I know from experience that it can take years for victims to understand that it is men’s responsibility not to rape.
For so many generations, women and children were told: don’t let yourself get raped – and if you do, for God’s sake, don’t whinge about it. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t ever assume for a second that you have the same right as a man to exist in a public or a private space without fear of assault and humiliation. Slowly, that message is starting to change, so that at last we are telling men and boys instead: do not rape.
Confronting structural violence is intensely painful. The pain comes in large part from the understanding that you, too, might be implicated by virtue of easy ignorance; that you, too, might have stood by while evil went on; that people you know and trust and respect might very well have done terrible things just because they thought they were allowed to.
This is going to hurt, I’m afraid. It is something we are going to have to sit with, and accept, and not shrink from, because right now we all need to decide what side of history we want to be on.
Content from our partners
Related
