Bashings, beatings, rapes and murders of women are daily occurrences in every country throughout the world. When details of these heinous crimes are made known there is often an outpouring of public outrage and grief.
There is often also a lot of soul-searching about why this violence has occurred, and answers can include various degrees of blaming the victims.
The proposition that any woman, in any circumstances, is responsible for the violent crimes that some men perpetrate against them is totally unacceptable and yet in a variety of ways it repeatedly raises its ugly head.
In an interview with one of the men convicted of the gang rape and murder of a woman on a bus in India, the man reportedly said that women would not be killed if they didn’t struggle and attempt to fight off their rapists.
A defence used in our own courts, by legal representatives for men accused of rape, is that the women did not struggle, and thereby consented to the act. Women everywhere are invariably in a no-win situation and the victims, not only of their attackers, but also of a range of values held in the society in which they live.
A woman’s character, attitudes, way of dressing, lifestyle, and habits are all potentially cited as contributing to the violent crimes perpetrated against them. Recently a senior police officer, investigating the murder of a 17-year-old Melbourne schoolgirl, said that females shouldn’t be alone in parks. The girl was walking in the early evening less than a kilometre from her home.
Suggestions that women are ‘asking’ for violence to be meted out against them permeates in the most subtle ways in societies that are predominately patriarchal. A crass example of this occurred recently when a priest, speaking to a congregation where the majority were primary-school-aged children, held up a newspaper with a photo of convicted rapist and murderer Adrian Bayley. Reportedly, he then said that if Bayley’s victim, Jill Meagher, was more ‘faith-filled’ she would have been home instead of out late on the night when she was raped and murdered.
Not surprisingly a spokesman for the Melbourne Archdiocese responded with an immediate apology for the priest’s ‘totally inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’ comments. Later the priest himself issued an apology citing his ignorance of the circumstances of the crime which occurred three years ago, a year before he took up his position in Melbourne. Undoubtably he was unaware of the community