London - When do you get a free pass to rape a woman?
Because we've all been scratching our heads about the answer to this one, Chrissie Hynde has given us some valuable guidelines in a Sunday Times Magazine interview.
“If you don't want to entice a rapist, don't wear high heels so you can't run from him,” the former rock 'n' roll star said. The instances when rape doesn't end up the fault of the victim are apparently confined to when a woman is “walking around and…very modestly dressed and…keeping to [herself]”.
Otherwise, like Hynde at 21 when she was taken to an empty house by a motorcycle gang member and forced into sexual acts under the threat of violence, you're practically asking for it.
The idea that sexual assault is a natural occurrence is damaging and insulting to both women and men. This belief that men are inclined towards rape, and that women have to dress or act accordingly, prevents so many assaults from being reported or prosecuted.
Rape is not a natural disaster, and men are not prowling animals whose instincts would be kept under control if only women would just stop putting on fishnets or getting drunk or looking so damn sexy.
However, psychological studies show rapists do believe all men rape.
When I was 21, I got on a night bus home after an evening spent at the pub with friends in London. A middle-aged man sat down beside me, trapped me in my seat and ran his hand up my thigh, asking me whether I was “one of those drunk single girls who's been on a big night out”. I told him a catalogue of creative lies: that I was a nurse returning from a shift, and my husband was at home with our baby. He apologised and got off the bus.
Perpetrators only start feeling guilt when they're told you don't fit into the “asking-for-it” category.
I feel sorry for Chrissie Hynde, believing all her life that she was to blame for a vicious sexual assault because she fit into one of those categories.
Chrissie, it wasn't your fault - and it isn't any other victim's, either.
The Independent