At a late-night party last year, a high school football player named Evan Westlake did something ordinary.
Westlake, who was sober, determined that his friend Mark Cole was too drunk to make a 10-minute drive home. At first, Cole refused to turn over his keys, claiming he could operate his Volkswagen Jetta just fine. Westlake was undeterred, though, eventually "tricking" Cole by waiting for him to relax and then forcibly seizing the keys.
What does this have to do with rape? Everything.
The party took place in Steubenville, Ohio, and included Westlake’s teammates Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, both of whom are now incarcerated for the rape they committed that night.
Yet maybe a half-hour later, Westlake walked in on the girl, sprawled out naked in the middle of a basement floor. To her side was Mays, exposed and slapping his penis on the girl's hip. Behind her was Richmond, who, Westlake said, was violating her with two fingers.
Westlake said goodbye to the guys and kept walking. A good friend with his eye on the safety of others just minutes before was suddenly unaware or unsure of what to do – or simply uncaring enough to do anything at all.
Imagine if all the advice we gave about preventing drunk driving put the onus on the victim:
Don’t drive in neighborhoods with bars. Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. You got hit by a drunk driver anyway? You must not have been checking your mirrors often enough.
That’s ridiculous. But it’s pretty much the message that gets sent out about rape.
Every woman has been drilled from an early age in “rape-prevention” tips. Don’t walk alone at night. Have your car keys in your hand. Don’t drink at a campus party. Don’t wear a short skirt. And if you’re on a date, be really clear when you say “no,” so he doesn’t accidentally rape you because he somehow failed to understand that you weren’t consenting.
As Amanda Marcotte (among others) has noted, this approach treats rape as if it were a natural disaster, a hurricane or tornado, something that can’t be prevented so it’s the victim’s responsibility to stay out of its way. And no matter how primly she dresses, how carefully she limits the circumstances under which she might leave the house, any report of a rape is invariably followed by a fine-tooth-comb scrutiny of the woman’s behavior in order to determine what she did wrong. These days the picking-apart of her actions is often preceded by a disclaimer that the speaker is “not blaming the victim.” Just, you know, helpfully pointing out how it must have been something she did that caused her to be raped. Sort of like the obligatory “I’m not a racist, but…” right before somebody says something racist.
The evidence from Steubenville all points to the rape being premeditated, yet we’re subjected to endless tsk-tsking about the victim being drunk. It's possible that she was drugged by her assailants, but even if she wasn't, they'd already decided to rape before she took so much as a sip of alcohol. It’s almost automatic: look for what the victim “did wrong,” tell yourself you’d never do that, and you’ll feel safe. I'm all for doing whatever you can to protect yourself, but the victim's behavior isn't the real problem. The one who actually has a choice here is the rapist.
Suppose a woman does everything right, and it works. At the campus party she buddies up with a female friend to keep an eye on each other, she doesn’t say anything even slightly flirtatious so she couldn’t be misunderstood, she doesn’t drink alcohol, she watches her soda to make sure no one drugs it, etc. etc. If there’s a rapist at the party, maybe he'll decide that she’s too much trouble. So he looks around and spots another young woman who wasn’t so careful and he targets her instead. It’s not humanly possible for every woman to take every possible precaution every moment of her life. When all we do is police the victims’ behavior, we’re not preventing rape, just switching the rapist to a different victim. It doesn’t solve the real problem.
Contrast that with a crime that isn’t gender-specific. We treat preventing drunk driving as the responsibility of the perpetrators, and have no problem sending them to jail even if the victim was foolishly out after midnight. We also give some responsibility to bystanders. Evan Westlake knew what to do because he’d spent a lifetime hearing, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”
A Canadian media campaign called Don’t Be That Guy decided to take a similar approach to rape.
The ads are directed at the people who can actually stop rape: the rapists. The images are stark: a woman passed out on a bed, dead to the world, while a faceless man above her undoes his belt. In another, a man’s reaching for a woman in a parked car; she’s looking away from him with a creeped-out expression. The messages are equally stark: “It’s not sex if she’s wasted.” “Sex with someone unable to consent = sexual assault.” Over the passed-out woman: “Just because she isn’t saying no, doesn’t mean she’s saying yes.” The newest round of ads includes one aimed at gay men: “It’s not sex when he changes his mind.”
The results were dramatic: a ten percent reduction in reported rapes in one year.
I don’t imagine that any would-be rapist sees these ads and thinks, “Oh, I get it now! I didn’t realize that sex with a drunk woman was wrong, but now that someone’s pointed it out, I won’t do it!” So what makes the ads effective?
The answer is connected with another popular rape myth: that rapists can’t control their actions. Rapists know what they’re doing, they usually plan the rape ahead of time, and they don’t want to pay any consequences for it. Two recent studies (one on college students, one in the military) found similar results: rapists are a small percentage of the population, but two-thirds of them are repeat offenders, with an average of six victims apiece. As long as the word “rape” wasn’t used, they were willing to admit to attempting or committing rape by the legal definition, and to the strategies they used to avoid consequences. (Caveat: these were studies of rapists who were walking around in the general population; those who went to prison might show a different pattern. Also, the studies were only on male perpetrators and female victims; there’s been very little research on other combinations.)
Here’s Lisak’s summary of his research:
In the course of 20 years of interviewing these undetected rapists, in both research and forensic settings, it has been possible for me to distill some of the common characteristics of the modus operandi of these sex offenders. These undetected rapists:
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse
control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.
Part of rape culture is the myth that if it doesn’t look a certain way – the stranger jumped out of the bushes and used a weapon to subdue a struggling victim – then it isn’t counted as “real” rape. Evan Westlake didn’t think to intervene because, as he explained afterward, “It wasn’t violent.” Rapists count on others to make these excuses for them, to call it something other than rape, to blame the victim’s drinking or “sluttiness,” to accept the story that he misunderstood and thought she was consenting – even if he’s had that same “misunderstanding” with six different women.
The Don’t Be That Guy campaign sends a message that the excuses aren’t going to work, that the rapist is risking real consequences to himself. Would Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond still have committed rape if they’d been hearing this message their whole life? Maybe. But for Mays (who appears to have been the instigator), it’s clear that he was counting on having a supportive cheering section. When he sent out the photos of the victim, he was expecting his friends to high-five him for it – and most of them did. What if instead he’d been getting the message his whole life that his friends would be disgusted and horrified by him?
The other aspect of the Don’t Be That Guy campaign is the message to bystanders. Evan Westlake had it drilled into his head that it’s not OK to stand by and let someone drive drunk. If one person had gotten the message that it’s not OK to stand by during a rape – even a rape that doesn’t look “violent” – things could have turned out very differently for Rehtaeh Parsons in Nova Scotia, for Audrie Pott in Saratoga, for “Jane Doe” in Steubenville.
MADD made it ordinary to prevent drunk driving. We need to make it ordinary to recognize rape even when it doesn’t fit the stereotypes. To let prospective rapists know that it’s them, not the victims, who will be ostracized. To get the message out that no one will cover for them, no one will buy the excuses. When a rapist decides that it’s not worth the risk – or when one goes to jail for the first offense because no one bought the excuses – that’s five or six more women who will not be victims.
We still have time to do something for the next victim, and the next.
OBLIGATORY REC LIST ADDITION: Thank you! This message really needs to get out. I'd like to see other communities copy the "Don't Be That Guy" model, hopefully with similar results.