Speak

If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.

If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.

If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.

If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.

If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.

Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.

When people scoff at the message that we need to teach people not to rape they make the assumption that the lesson goes: “Rape is bad. Don’t do it.” That is not what the lesson looks like. The lesson, once it is adopted, will be that every single person out there, regardless of any defining personal characteristics, is a human being of value, and with a right to make their own decisions about what bodily contact to have with others. There is nothing a person can do that makes them less deserving of that right. Violating any person’s right to control the when, what and who with of their sexual interactions is wrong. Do it and you will be punished, and you will deserve it.

N.B. While not all those who are raped are women, and not all rapists are men, much less rape apologists; rape prevention myths are always targeted at women, and this post reflects this. My language in the final paragraph is very consciously gender-neutral.