The unending talk about women’s dressing and rape

THERE has been this persistent attempt at linking the way and manner girls and women dress to the acts of rape they experience that it has become infuriating that many would still continue to subscribe to this patently false and ingenious link or assign any consideration or validity to it. The tendency has been in the past to consign such link to elements in the fringes of societies or those who are wont to excuse anything and not assign responsibility for actions undertaken or perpetrated and always seeking to explain issues away on the altar of excuses and attenuating circumstances. But when this kind of argument and link starts to emanate from otherwise responsible members of the society or comes from official positions and those in high societal offices, evidently there would be the need to revisit the issue and bring out the evasiveness and lack of responsibility underpinning the argument and link.

The latest purveyor of this nauseating argument is the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who recently said in an interview that sexual assaults on women should be blamed on the way most women dress. As far as Imran Khan is concerned, it is common sense that provocative dressing would provoke sexual violence. His argument: ‘if a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots,’ calling for the removal of ‘temptation’ (in the form of provocative dressing by women) from the society to quell the rising numbers of rape and sexual assault in Pakistan. He would rather prefer that women dress in clothes that completely cover their bodies in order for their bodies to not be seen by strangers, arguing that this is to stop temptation on the part of the men because  ‘not every man has willpower. (And) if you keep on increasing vulgarity, it will have consequences.’ It is such a shame that a Prime Minister would utter this gibberish – indicating that some men do not have willpower to control themselves when they see women in some kind of dresses and because of this, we should blame the women for their kind of dresses and not the men bereft of willpower!

Is it the fault of the women that some men do not have willpower? What logic would explain not taking issues with the men for their lack of willpower and then insisting on their bearing the burden and consequences of their lack of willpower? This would be akin to shifting the blame for theft from the thief to the owner of what was stolen for not putting his/her good in a fitting and proper place. The response of the former President of Pakistan, M. ZahaibNabeel, to this line of argument from the Prime Minister is telling: ‘The statement by Imran Khan on women clothing as one of the causes of rape is absurd and illogical. It’s a shame for a nation that such a person is the Prime Minister of Pakistan … .’

It would seem as if Prime Minister Khan has never heard about rural communities in the world where people dress with minimal clothing and almost always leave themselves top-naked, both women and men and girls and boys, without anybody engaging in rape or sexual assault of the women. In which case, even where people walk around top naked, with men seeing women’s boobs every time as they are not covered, men still do not engage in rape and sexual assault of women if there are enough social mores and sanction against such behaviour. The implication of this would be that we have to go beyond dressing to situate the notion of rape and sexual assault of women given that human society operates on the basis of rules and regulations and sanctions and to the extent that women are not violating any law with respect to their dressing, it would amount to grabbing or clutching at straws for the argument to be made about women’s dressing being responsible for their rape and sexual assault by men. For we know that crimes are usually perpetrated through the flaw in the perpetrator or because of flaws in the policing and security apparatus that could make apprehension difficult and give the perpetrator the possibility and high chance of getting away with the crime without detection and apprehension. It is in this sense that Jill Filippvic has argued that rape of women (and sexual assault of women) is not (just about sex but) it’s about both power and violence. Rapists use sex organs as the locus of their violence, but rape isn’t about sex, at least not in the sense  being motivated by sexual attraction or an uncontrollable sexual urge.

Rape is about sex in the sense that rapists not only commit acts of sexual violence, but that the pervasive threat of sexual assault is used to limit women’s sovereignty and justify sexual assault itself. … Rapists don’t rape because they can’t ‘get’ sex elsewhere. Rapists don’t rape because they’re uncontrollably turned on by the sight of some cleavage, or a midriff, or red lipstick, or an ankle. They rape because they’re misogynist sadists, and they flourish in places where misogyny is justified as tradition and maleness comes with a presumption of violence. … (And) rapists are particularly abetted by cultures in which women are second-class citizens, where women bodies are intensely politicized, where social hierarchies outlandishly privilege certain members and where there’s a presumption of male authority and righteousness.’The same way that rapists and aspiring rapists would be emboldened by the inadequacies of the police leading to the possibility of getting away with the crime, or the tendency on the part of the patriarchal society to minimize the import of crimes against women particularly sexual crimes against women. Which would be why we would have more inclination toward rape where society is reluctant to openly frown at rape and other sexual assaults against women on the pretext that the female body is public property and that women are not of the same societal status as men and are therefore less deserving of basic rights than men. Combating rape and sexual assault against women would therefore have to start with an understanding of the power and cultural contexts providing basis for these crimes in order to come to terms with the kind of argument advanced by Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan on women dressing, which argument is also certainly flowing from the patriarchal mindset of treating women and girls as less than men and boys in the society. (We must come to the realization that we cannot continue to blame women as victims of rape and sexual assault for their predicament while overlooking the responsibility of the male perpetrators of the crimes. We must stop the continuing tale about women dressing being responsible for their being victims of rape and sexual assault and focus on the male perpetrators who are aided by the persisting patriarchal thinking of denying the equality of women and girls with men and boys, and therefore in a position and with the mindset of not seeing the bodies of women and girls as deserving of respect including the right to not be touched except by consent.

What is missing in a patriarchal setting is the idea of consent and equality given that women and girls are regarded as inferior, such that the whole society has a duty to address and correct this negative and wrong thinking about women and girls as part of the duty of combatting rape and sexual assault against women and girls.See the rest on www.tribuneonlineng.com)

• Yakubu is of the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan.

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