Transnational Sexual Violence: Globalising the conversation about Rape Culture

We live in a world that feels so conflicted by the boundaries and categories we have ourselves created, whether those be boundaries of gender, race, culture, nation, and so forth… Yet, simultaneously, our world feels increasingly interconnected and global, with conversations no longer limited to the national boundaries that had once so strongly confined them. In the past couple of months, two stories of sexual assault (among millions that remain unshared) captured the global attention of our social media feeds and newspaper covers; in Brazil, a 17-year old girl was raped by 30 men who proceeded to film and post the assault on social media pages whilst in the US, Stanford university athlete Brock Turner’s rape of an unconscious young woman, whose letter to her attacker went viral on social media, captured the world’s attention. Both these assaults led to huge national debates and endless conversations on the issue of sexual violence and the pervasiveness of rape culture within those countries’ mentalities. Both these assaults became symbols of the daily violence suffered by women and thousands used them as an opportunity to protest the systematic gender inequality that underlines their countries. Yet, despite having such similar impacts on the public attention and initiating the same controversy, both these assaults and the conversations that they initiated remained very much stuck within their ‘national confinements’. It seems that whenever the discussion of rape culture emerges within the sphere of civil society, that discussion seems to be very much focused on the specific national configurations that promote or intensify violence against women and never on the ways this violence crosses borders. Whilst it is important to distinguish these two cases from each other and to remember that specific cultural settings may be more inclined to create atmospheres of sexual violence, I would like to try to make the point, using these two high-profile cases as examples, that rape culture and gender inequality is an issue that is affecting us all (yes, not only women…) on a global scale and offer some potential suggestions for moving ahead with such issues positively and productively.

Above: Stanford graduating student holds sign saying 'Stanford Protects Rapists' in June 2016 after the Brock Turner case gains national attention. Photo by Getty/Gabrielle Lurie.

When, in January 2015, the young woman raped by Stanford-swimmer Brock Turner posted the statement she wrote to him online, a powerful essay beginning with “you don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me and that’s why we’re here today”, she perhaps did not expect her message to gain viral global attention across social media networks. Despite rape being an issue that affects one woman in three in the US, the victim’s letter became a symbol for a conversation that’s often ignored and thousands began to share their own stories and experiences. Turner’s sentencing, in which he was given only six-months in prison out of the fourteen years he originally faced, also caused global media outrage and even led to a petition signed by over a million supporters to remove Judge Aaron Persky from the bench for his leniency. For many, the message of Turner’s minimum sentencing was very clear: we are a society that will excuse sexual assault when committed by a privileged, drunk white man (Turner’s defence was built mainly around his overconsumption of alcohol over his responsibility for the crime), but blame the woman attacked for that very same alcohol consumption and her inability to prove that she didn’t consent. The high-profile nature of the case allowed people to move on from the particularities of Turner’s assault and begin to address the structural, systematic ways in which U.S society - and specifically its university systems- support and protect a culture of rape and violence against women. As many began to clarify, the problem was not the amount of alcohol consumed by Turner (as he tried to claim) or the length of the skirt of the woman attacked, the problem was a pervasive cultural setting in which women were defined through their sexual objectification and men taught to be aggressive, dominant, and insensitive. The issue was a society where the father of Turner referred to his son’s sexual assault of a unconscious young woman on the floor behind a dumpster as ’20 minutes of action’ and where the assaulter’s words are taken more seriously and with more belief than those of the victim. The issue is a society where we are more accustomed and attracted to images of women selling burgers in bikinis than images of women in powerful leadership positions and where men are raised since they’re boyhood as entitled by nature to a woman’s sexuality and submission. But I’d like to ask, is this societal description only really limited to the U.S or is it not by far an issue that has insidiously become global and apparent transnationally?

Above: Brazilian woman protesting the rape of a 17-year old girl by 30 men in Rio de Janeiro holding a sign saying 'Teach your son to respect' - Photo: Xinhua/Barcroft Images

Around the same time Turner’s case gained global viral attention, another very different case shocked and sparked a national debate on the very same concept of ‘rape culture’ in Brazil. A young 17-year old girl in Rio de Janeiro was brutally raped by approximately 30 men and the case only got the attention of the police after the rapists filmed and posted videos of their assault on social media platforms. Whilst it is clear that in many aspects, from the factors of social class to the amount of perpetrators to the culturally-specific context of Brazilian society, this case differs drastically from Stanford student Turner’s assault, it also sparked a polarising conversation around the situation of women in Brazil and the constant fear of sexual assault they experience. Whilst many used the viral attention around the Rio rape case to discuss the overly sexualised position of the Brazilian woman in society and the ‘macho’ ideals that are imposed on its men, some also used the opportunity to doubt the girl’s reliability and bash what they felt was an exaggerate feminist movement. “If she had been in church or school this would not have happened to her” was the argument of many on Brazilian social media platforms and some even tried to find evidence to prove that it wasn’t even rape in the first place. After all, is this mentality of undermining the woman’s claim of assault regardless of the video evidence not the same one that was expressed by Brock’s father when he described his son’s attack as ’20 minutes of action’? Is it not the same societal expectation that it is a woman’s job to avoid sexual assault (not going out, not wearing short clothes, not drinking, etc…) and not the responsibility of the men to resist their ‘animal’ urges and respect the importance of consent and comfort? Is this ‘rape culture’ more than just a national problem but rather a global one that we need to urgently address? When the same conversation is being held all over the world, it is clear that it is not only our communications, but also our negative societal expectations, that are being globalised.

Above: Collage of different advertisements where women are diminished to secondary, sexual objects - only present for men's use and enjoyment. Brands include American Apparel, Lynx, Dolce and Gabana, etc...

So what is a global rape culture? What does the term mean, how does it emerge, and most importantly, what do we do about it ? The first step in understanding the way rape culture emerges is looking at the gender-based roles and expectations we place on children and people as they grow; from a young age, we remind our children and ourselves that their sex determines not only their biological features, but also the personality traits we expect them to adopt in response to it. For women, we are taught to be ‘feminine’ - which has come to mean beauty-centred, soft-spoken, and often submissive to the needs of others than ourselves (our husbands, our children, etc…). For men, in almost direct contrast to the profile of a feminine woman, are imposed the values of masculinity to fit in which means being aggressively dominant and unnaturally insensitive. Whilst we may not be directly saying that these traits are what matter to our children, it is still the subconscious message we are giving them when we divide the world of children between playing with barbies or action-men. As these very same children grow up, the gender-division that is imposed on them only intensifies. Teenage girls are increasingly bombarded with images of the ‘ideal’ beauty and are taught that they should equate their bodies, and men’s desire for their bodies, with their sense of self-worth. On the other hand, things for teenage boys are not much better; they quickly find out that any form of sensitivity within a macho environment is seen and exploited as a weakness and that their value is tied to their ability to assert dominance. We teach young women that they must be careful, street-smart, and adaptable because if they are not, they will provoke man’s ‘animal instinct’ in which case her assault was her fault (‘she asked for it’). Yet we avoid to teach the men that it is their behaviours, and not those of the women dancing in the shortest skirts, that must be altered and rectified. The result of this insidious process is a society where we will blame the victims and never the perpetrators for their acts of violence and assault, a society where we slut-shame women but yet idolise men like Chris Brown and Floyd Mayweather regardless of their histories of abuse, a society where the word of thirty-five women is still not taken as seriously as Bill Cosby, a society where Brock Turner will only face six-months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman, a society where out of thirty men raping a semi-conscious teenage woman none felt the need to stop or change the situation (in very opposite, they filmed it…), a world where we allow man to be animal but reject a woman’s rationality, a world where rape is a feared reality for women wherever they are in this world…

And so I would like us to move away from thinking about the issues of gender inequality, feminism, or sexual assault as problems that are affecting and involving only women. I would like us to start thinking this as a discussion about how our gender stereotypes are destroying the lives of not only young women but also the lives of young men. For those that can move past the shocking impact and stereotypes of the word, Feminism is not about some sort of crazy rat-race of gender-blaming the other side or trying to prove that women are superior or suffer more than men. Feminism is about addressing a reality in which there is a serious unbalance in the expectations we place on men and women and how this is harming and affecting BOTH men and women. It is about creating a conversation and a space where both women and perhaps now most importantly men, can speak out against the different diversity of factors that end up creating a pervasive rape culture. Let’s create a world where men don’t always have to be dominant, strong, and hard and women aren’t always emotional, irrational, and submissive, a world where people don’t feel that they are entitled to anyone’s body, and a world where those who abuse are always receiving fair punishment. Let's realise that this is a global conversation that we urgently need to be uniting for and become the examples that we want to show for our future daughters and our future sons.

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