By Shreena Thakore:
No Country For Women recently launched a digital campaign called 'What If We Treated All Crimes Like We Treat Sexual Assault?' that uses humour to illustrate the problematic responses to cases of sexual assault. Each piece satirizes a different type of victim-blaming by depicting how ridiculous these rhetorics would sound if applied to any other crime.
The most common responses to sexual assault broadly fall into 5 main categories:
1. Infantilising the victim and depicting the crime as a result of the victim’s naivete.
2. Accusing the victim of false allegations and defaming them.
3. Criticising the victim for not living in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance where they constantly expect and prepare for a crime to be committed against them.
4. Hijacking victimhood by dismissing the victim’s voice, shifting focus onto irrelevant entities and/or sympathizing with the perpetrator.
5. Appealing to sentiments of nationalism and diverting the conversation from the incident at hand.
Such arguments trivialize sexual assault, delegitimize its significance, and/or straightaway dismiss it. They add to the existing stigma that survivors experience and prevent a critical and informed inspection of the crime.
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