Tackling Rape Culture: Ending Patriarchy

Jan Jordan

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000605853
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Criminology

In Tackling Rape Culture: Ending Patriarchy, Jan Jordan asks why, despite decades of feminist activism, does rape culture remain so endemic within contemporary society. She argues that, in order to understand the global pandemic of sexual violence, we must view rape culture as a consequence of the social divisiveness that emerges from the logic of patriarchy. In advancing this argument, Jordan offers a comprehensive indictment of the patriarchal system while recognising also women's efforts to resist its edicts. Jordan critically explores two mechanisms that she argues are central to the maintenance and reproduction of rape culture - silencing and objectification. Both are examined as patriarchal strategies that have been relied on for centuries to control and constrain women's lives, silencing their voices and keeping them as 'othered' outsiders in a male-defined world. Women throughout history have sought ways to resist such control and, since the second-wave women's movement of the 1970s, this has included multiple initiatives both offline and more recently online. While #MeToo is being hailed by many as evidence that the silencing of women's voices about rape has finally been broken, Jordan urges a more critical appraisal given the continued dominance of patriarchal thinking. To end rape culture, Jordan argues, we must end patriarchy.

This timely and provocative book, which complements Jordan's Women, Rape and Justice: Unravelling the Rape Conundrum (Routledge, 2022), will be of great interest to researchers, students, practitioners and activists seeking to understand and challenge the pervasive rape culture characterising contemporary patriarchal society.

1The misogyny of rape culture

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003289913-1

In March 2021, a young woman, Sarah Everard, left a friend’s house in London around 9 pm to walk home. She chose busy main roads rather than shorter, darker routes, and spoke to her boyfriend on the phone for 15 minutes while she walked (Hawley, 2021). “She did many of the things women are advised to do to improve their safety, yet she didn’t make it home” (Hookway, 2021). Her assailant, Wayne Couzens, was a police officer with the London Metropolitan Police, a member of their élite diplomatic protection unit (Al Jazeera, 2021). He tricked Sarah into compliance by displaying his police ID before falsely arresting her for breaching COVID-19 lockdown rules (Turova, 2021). Handcuffed and in his car, Sarah was driven not to a police station but far outside of London, where her burned remains were found in a builder’s bag in woodland a week later (Hawley, 2021). A post-mortem report stated she had been raped and strangled to death with Couzens’ police belt (Braithwaite & Fox, 2021).

Her rape and killing prompted widespread outrage over violence against women, with a vigil held on Clapham Common on 13 March, 2021, the park near where Sarah was last seen (Hookway, 2021; Turova, 2021). What followed was disbelief and anger in many quarters when the Metropolitan Police declared the event was illegal under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and actively disbanded the gathering (BBC, 2021). As reported in The Guardian:

The evening in south London began in grief and silence, as hundreds gathered to remember Sarah Everard and call for changes that will keep others safe. It ended in anger and violence, as police trampled flowers and candles laid out in tribute to Everard and tried to silence women speaking out in her memory.

Tensions were high before the vigil, which had officially been cancelled after the Metropolitan police refused to give the organisers a permit. That compounded anger at the force, already high after a serving officer was charged with Everard’s kidnap and murder.

(Graham-Harrison, 2021)

The heavy-handed police actions during the vigil were widely condemned, and included concerns verbalised by London Mayor Sadiq Khan and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Hookway, 2021). Allegations of brutality were made, and a widely published photo depicted Patsy Stevenson, 28, being roughly handcuffed by two officers at the vigil, after which she was issued with a 200 pound fine (Casciani, 2021). She subsequently spoke of how her personal fear increased when, following her arrest, approximately 50 police and security officers, all in uniform, contacted her via Tinder app, adding, “It is almost like an intimidation thing, saying ‘look we can see you’, and that, to me, is terrifying” (BBC, 2021). The response of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was condemned by many for failing to hear what women were saying, and calls were made for her resignation, which she steadfastly rejected at the time (Hookway, 2021). The police inspectorate subsequently exonerated the actions taken by officers at the vigil, stating they had “acted appropriately,” although did concede the Clapham Common event had been a “public relations disaster” for a force that appeared “tone deaf” (Dodd & Grierson, 2021).

Sarah’s death was viewed by many women as preventable if the justice system had been operating as it should. Not only was her killer a serving police officer, but it emerged he had been previously accused of indecent exposure on at least two separate occasions before he raped and murdered her (Al Jazeera, 2021). Questions were asked about why, following such allegations, he was not suspended from duty, and why the complainants were ignored. The debate escalated into a “national conversation” about women’s safety in light of the high prevalence of men’s violence against women, including from policemen (Al Jazeera, 2021). Following his arrest, Couzens was quickly dismissed as not “one of us” (Turova, 2021), despite it emerging that he had been nicknamed by some colleagues as “The Rapist” and belonged to a police WhatsApp group that shared misogynistic, racist, and homophobic content (Turova, 2021). This led to five British police officers facing misconduct action over the sharing, via social media, of messages relating to Sarah Everard’s rape and murder, including an “inappropriate graphic depicting violence against women” (Braithwaite & Fox, 2021), while also uncovered was the fact that at least 770 Metropolitan Police employees had been accused of sexual misconduct since 2010. The “national conversation” about women’s safety continued throughout the year, with an article in October 2021 reporting that in the 28 days between Couzens murdering Sarah and the time of his sentencing, at least 81 other women in the UK were killed by men (Ingala Smith, 2021).

On asking what could be learned from this case, a Mental Health Today journalist emphasised the silencing impacts associated with how events unfolded, observing:

One of the most pertinent issues that have come up as a result of this case has been Police handling of a reported assault, abuse and rape, the very literal silencing by shutting down peaceful vigils and the unnecessary force used when arresting vigil attendees. This re-traumatising can then re-victimise those who have felt ignored or who haven’t been believed when they’ve attempted to tell their truths or report a crime in the past.

(Porteous-Sebouhian, 2021)

The “tone deafness” of the police emerged in other contexts also, including in ill-judged prevention advice. For example, in relation to protecting themselves from officers of Couzens’ ilk, various members of the Metropolitan Police offered women safety advice after his sentencing in October 2021: “these tips included running away from a police officer if he seems suspicious and flagging down a passing bus during an arrest if something doesn’t feel right” (McColm, 2021). As Hannah Bows (2021) pointed out, some safety messages also sounded contradictory in that while Cressida Dick sought to reassure women that London’s streets were safe, her officers were advising women not to go out alone:

On one hand, sexual harassment and violence by men is viewed as inevitable and we’re conditioned to believe the fear we live with is normal. On the other, women are often told they’re overreacting and that violence is rare. But how helpful are these approaches in terms of eradicating systemic violence against women? And do they keep us safer?

(Bows, 2021)

“Systemic violence against women” is normalised within societies where patriarchal ideologies continue their dominance. It is particularly manifest in suppressing women’s allegations of rape and in reducing women’s bodies to male use objects. Sarah’s mother recognised this when she described the pain of knowing her daughter’s body had been “disposed of as if she was rubbish” (Ingala Smith, 2021), Couzens’ final act in reducing her to a prop in his own fantasy.

The interchangeability of women as disposable objects forms the sexual backdrop to the most prevalent and normalised definitions of masculinity. Writing in The Scotsman, Euan McColm (2021) spoke as a man about his own recognition of how men threaten women’s safety, identifying “the real issue is how men can make women safer.” As he urged:

We have to talk about the uncomfortable truth that supposedly harmless “locker room banter” is part of a spectrum with the casual objectification of women at one end, their murder at the other. If we are honest with ourselves, which man could say that he has never done something that would sit on that scale?

The rape and murder of any woman is preventable, not by telling women to change their behaviour but by challenging men to change theirs. In ways similar to how sexual harassment and rape exist on the same continuum, murder can be positioned as the most extreme act of dehumanisation, the woman’s body objectified and silenced forever.

Introduction

The “national conversation” sparked by the Sarah Everard case is being articulated in many different countries and contexts within what has been termed a “post #MeToo world” (Brooks, 2018). Despite the implied optimism, we continue to live within a culture in which rape remains normative and rapists are largely unpunished. This points to the curious conundrum facing twenty-first century feminism. Why, despite 50 years of activism and reforms, is rape today no less prevalent and rape justice no easier to achieve? These issues were the focus of the book, Women, Rape and Justice: Unravelling the Rape Conundrum (2022), in which I explored how feminists successfully placed sexual violence on the wider political agenda. They fought for changes in many aspects, including legal definitions, victim/survivor support services, police investigations, and trial processes, and indeed clear gains have been achieved since the first marches and protests of the 1970s women’s movement. Despite these successes, a woman raped today stands little more chance of seeing the perpetrator held accountable than her grandmother would have, decades earlier. So why do such inequities continue?

This book is a quest to understand contemporary barriers to justice for rape victim/survivors. It reflects my own research journey that, while it began by examining present realities, took me farther and farther into patriarchy’s deep and complex past. My attempts to unravel the binds that hold rape culture together increasingly led me back to our earliest rape laws and how these have been enforced through the centuries. In Women, Rape and Justice (Jordan, 2022), I focused on the attrition problem and efforts to ameliorate the criminal justice system, concluding that while some important reforms had been actioned, little substantively had changed in terms of the underlying mindset. While many studies have concluded that to effect improvements in how those victimised by rape are treated requires widespread attitudinal changes (e.g., Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, & McAuslan, 2004; Flood, 2019; Temkin & Krahé, 2008), few have sought to explore the belief system that has, for centuries, framed and shaped those attitudes. My emphasis in this book focuses on how the patriarchal legacy impacts contemporary ideas and behaviours about sexual violence. Understanding how our rape culture originated and developed is an essential precursor to dismantling the thought structures and mechanisms that sustain it, and a necessary path to follow as we explore the rape conundrum.

The rape conundrum

When feminists, during the second wave of the women’s movement, began speaking about the prevalence of rape, many hoped that showcasing its frequency and harms would galvanise widespread interventions aimed at protecting women (Rose, 1977). It seemed obvious that breaking the silence about rape would result in concentrated campaigns to eliminate its occurrence, and that the historical travesty of men evading accountability for the sexual assaults they perp...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The misogyny of rape culture
• 2 Understanding our patriarchal DNA
• 3 Silencing women
• 4 Objectifying women
• 5 Women objectified
• 6 Resisting rape culture
• 7 Ending patriarchy
• Index