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The SlutWalk message is simple but challenges hundreds of years of worldwide traditional gender ideologies: Blaming victims of rape is unacceptable.
According to research by the National Institute of Justice Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 2.1 million women in the U.S. are raped and/or physically assaulted annually.
Tech psychology graduate student Brianna Bennet was a co-organizer of Saturday evening’s SlutWalk and said the protest marches first began in Toronto, Ontario, Canada after a police officer told women if they would stop dressing like sluts, they would not get assaulted.
“There’s a fine line women are expected to walk,” Bennet said. “You’re supposed to be sexy, but not too sexy, and if you cross the line one way or the other, it’s a problem. That’s unfair, and men have an equivalent as well.”
According to Women’s Protective Services of Lubbock, national research indicates that one in four women has been physically assaulted or raped by an intimate partner.
“When you think of how many people are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, both men and women, the statistics are outrageous,” Bennet said. “Whether you’re aware of it or not, you know many people.”
She said she completed a practicum at the Children’s Advocacy Center last year providing therapy for children who were victims of sexual assault, and they are equally as likely to be victimized as women. A few years ago in Texas, she said an 11-year old girl was gang raped and accused of dressing too provocatively and looking older than she was.
According to research by the NIJCDC, 54 percent of female rape victims experienced their first rape before the age of 18.
South Plains College nursing student Rheanna Archer said she jumped at the opportunity to organize this year’s SlutWalk for personal reasons. Her aunt’s husband molested her for six years, she said, and to this day no one in her family believes her. Because he is always at family holidays, she said she never wants to go.
“I have friends that say, ‘Well how come so-and-so was raped? What were they doing? What were they wearing? How come their friends weren’t with them?’” she said. “It doesn’t matter if she was drunk. It doesn’t matter if she said yes then said no and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of sex.”
Jeff Ross is an assistant professor in lifespan development and human sexuality at South Plains College and helped organize this year’s SlutWalk. He said over 12 years of teaching psychology, rape became an important issue for him when more and more of his students began to reveal in class that they were survivors of sexual assault, molestation and child abuse.
He said people close to him have confided in him similarly, so he participates in the SlutWalk and other awareness activities to help reduce the acceptability of sexual assault in our society.
“When I hear people blame 11-year olds for being raped, I just say we have got to change how we view things,” he said. “I remember growing up we talked a lot about getting women drunk and having sex with them because it was kind of an expected thing for us and I didn’t consider it rape at that time. We need to teach our children that sex is and should be a wonderful, healthy, joyous thing and consent for everybody involved is a part of that.”
Bennet said the culture of blaming victims is pervasive throughout the world and although the process of changing the social script is slow, events like the SlutWalk are the way to do it.
“There is script that men are supposed to pursue women and women are supposed to impose the limits and that damages a lot of people, men, women and children,” she said. “It’s like the model in a magazine, she doesn’t really look like that. She’s been edited and changed to some warped perception.”
Like a magazine, she said society’s sexual scripts are not real. Blaming rape victims for being victimized, primarily women and children, not only robs them of their humanity by objectifying them but robs the rapist of his humanity as well.
According to research by the NIJCDC, 93 percent of the women and 86 percent of the men who were raped and/or physically assaulted since the age of 18 were assaulted by a male.
“I have a brother, a father, and male friends,” she said, “And they can control themselves. By saying it’s about the clothing somebody wears or the things they do, that’s saying that the perpetrator, who is stereotypically a man, has no control over that himself.”
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