Alina UtrataThis article addresses sexual violence.
“If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Alyssa Milano tweeted on October 15. And suddenly, millions of women all over the world were sharing their stories. The #MeToo movement had started.
But I could have told you about that problem a long time ago. Every woman could have. I remember being eighteen years old and realizing that there was not a single woman I knew who didn’t have a story about sexual assault or emotional manipulation or harassment. They vary in terms of severity and pain, but I don’t know any women who have gone through life unscarred in some way.
Not one.
Now, a judicial review of how rape trials are conducted in Northern Ireland in the wake of the high-profile Ulster rugby case is set to look at potential changes to the process with an emphasis on how victims are treated.
But will legal reforms make a difference in how women are treated in our established social order? Is there really any court or any country in the world where women are not vulnerable to violence?
Perhaps girls’ real coming of age rituals are actually about learning to understand invisible violence. The way violence against women is perpetrated in ‘civilized society’ reveals something about how we think about rule of law.
Statistics tell us that three out of four victims of sexual assault know their perpetrators. But what does this mean?
It means our traditional conception of sexual assault is false. The stranger in the alleyway who jumps out and attacks us at night happens, but it’s rare. Rape rarely looks like violence: explicit, physical, brutal and—most importantly—anonymous.
Protection for that type of violence is easy. Get a taxi home. Don’t walk alone. Take self-defense classes. Better still, find a nice, strong man who will protect you.
But we live in a rule of law society, and violence is can often be about coercion rather than force. Assault doesn’t always look like violence—it can looks like humor; ‘banter’, even. What is violent about a bunch of boys having a laugh? Except if you’re a woman, and you know what happens when the language of violence becomes actual violence.
Protection in rule of law societies is no longer about survival of the fittest—it’s about structures of power. How well does our criminal justice system protect your interests? If you are marginalized—if you’re poor, or a racial minority, or a woman—you can be subjected to violence and the system generally won’t protect you. You aren’t safe.
Kimberle Crenshaw in her seminal work on intersectionality made an interesting observation: prosecutorial teams often don’t want women on juries in rape cases because they are more likely to acquit. Why? Women don’t want to admit their own vulnerability to violence. The victim had to have done something wrong—otherwise, it meant that women lived in a world where they were just as vulnerable to violence as the victim. And that couldn’t be possible. It can’t be.
As an American student studying in Belfast, my life had particular parallels with the girl at the center of the Ulster case. But I think a lot of women felt the same way: it could have been me. Or one day, it might be me. Or—it already was me.
Many women I know, listening to this case play out for weeks through the media, were repeatedly taken back to that moment in their lives when somebody hurt them and nobody did anything about it.
The worst part was listening to people’s responses. People on buses, and in pubs, and cafes, and in classrooms, and on Twitter. People who said she was leading them on, that she just wants fame or money, that she’s a silly girl causing trouble, that she’s a slut, that she deserved it, that they don’t believe her.
Listening to them, day after day, was an unpleasant and terrifying reminder that if this had been my story, they would have been saying the same thing about me, they would have been saying they don’t believe me—they would have been saying that someone could hurt me and nobody would do anything about it.
And then there were the responses to women online tweeting about the story. People tweeted at journalist Amanda Ferguson that she would never be in danger of being sexually assaulted. I stopped following them for my own mental health, but they’re nothing new for women. Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned for putting Jane Austen on the pound note, received death threats on Twitter; including from two men recently jailed, who tweeted “f*** off and die you worthless piece of crap”… “go kill yourself” and “rape is the last of your worries” and “I’ve only just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried!” [sic].
Clementine Ford, who reported a man for calling her a slut online to his employers who ultimately fired him, received a barrage of threatening comments including “being raped would ruing your life in a similar way. Let’s hope you are always safe. hahahaha.”
Last week in Northern Ireland, DUP MLA Carla Lockhart has become the target of an angry online mob, posting misogynist and hurtful messages about her. This wasn’t about politics. Lockhart received support from Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill and Alliance Party Naomi Long, both of who have been targets of similar comments. Long once even read out on camera some of the abusive messages she received online to bring attention to the problem.
This isn’t because of Twitter—Monica McWilliams talked about the Woman’s Coalition being shouted at, intimidated, and even pushed during the Good Friday negotiations. They also had an “insult of the week” noticeboard where they put up the insult, name of the person who had said it, and the time. If the men denied having said it, McWilliams told them to look in the transcript. At one point, she recalled, having seen a particular incident, David Ervine put a politician up against the wall and said if he ever saw them touch these women again, they could say goodbye to their peace agreement.
It is an uncomfortable truth we don’t want to look in its ugly face that our male strangers or acquaintances or friends or even men we love can hurt us and violate us and threaten us and usually no one will do anything about it. It means that just 5% of reported rapes in Northern Ireland resulted in charge or conviction. It means that there were 2,734 sexual offences recorded including 737 offences of rape in Northern Ireland in 2015. It means that there were 28,287 domestic violence incidents reported, and that there are five people killed each year as a result of domestic violence in NI. It means that the cute boy at that party can take us into an upstairs bedroom and rape us and, most likely, no-one will do anything to protect us.
That is was the Ulster trial was about, for many women. It was not about whether they did it. It was not about whether we could prove it. It was about the terrifying realization that the system won’t protect us.
Women aren’t safe. My friends aren’t safe. I’m not safe.
The system needs to do better to protect us.
