I am not going to talk about whether a group of powerful and influential public figures forced their way into a police station. I am not going to talk about whether a gun was held to the head of a police officer to threaten him to drop criminal charges. I am not going to talk about the potential gross abuse of power and the attempted cover up. I am not going to talk about whether that young woman was or was not raped, burned with a cigarette, and beaten with a gun, and I am not going to talk about the potential political motivations of anyone that was involved – instead, I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
What I am going to talk to you about is the attitude towards victims of abuse, and the fact that these individuals are not taken seriously by the law, or society.
By trawling social media and enlisting the help of Google Translate, I have found some truly disturbing comments about the young woman in question. People have speculated that she could have been drunk or that perhaps she was in a relationship with him, neither of which is an excuse for rape or violence.
Let me just clarify something for a second; it doesn’t matter if a woman is unconscious or whether she is in any kind of relationship with them – if she does not consent or refuses to consent, it is still rape and her assailant is still guilty. Neither of these situations justify the actions of a rapist under any circumstances, and the sooner we stop blaming women for violence they suffer, or inferring that they deserved it, the better for society as a whole.
Another common theme I found in the comments was the belief that she probably just made it all up. Well here is something for you, women generally do not make up rape allegations. Furthermore, the negligible percentage of women that DO make up rape allegations, do not exhaust multiple avenues of recourse and travel to different places to file complaints. Any individual that makes an accusation such as rape, deserves to have their case examined in detail, investigated properly, and concluded without interference from any third party or external individual.
Should a woman state she has been sexually assaulted, she must be treated as if she is telling the truth until sufficient evidence has been gathered to suggest otherwise. She must be medically examined with female police officers and specialised doctors present. She must be interviewed delicately in the presence of female officers and psychologists, and the truth must be ascertained based on evidence, assessments, and professional opinions, not conjecture and trial by social media.
This lack of understanding stinks of a global issue with the general attitude to women- we are not humans that suffer pain and hurt, we are not humans that deserve justice, and we are not humans that deserve the right to be protected. We are objects – playthings of the powerful that are purely there to provide entertainment, and of course, for “big men” to stick their dicks in whenever they so choose. The concept that a woman would refuse or rebuff the advances of a virile man is completely alien and in fact, she should be grateful that such a prime example of the male species should deem her worthy enough for his attention.
This attitude is prevalent in many facets of society; from the men that talk to themselves for years in our inboxes and the dick pics we receive, to the men that kill women for deciding to end a relationship that they did not want to be in. This is all indicative of an attitude that sees women as lesser beings. Now add to the fact that a man can get out of gender-based crime charges by either paying money, or getting someone to hold a gun to a policeman’s head, and we have a terribly dire situation.
In all cases of violence against women, women deserve to be taken seriously. We deserve to be listened to, to be respected, and to be able to take full legal recourse until the truth is ascertained. We shouldn’t have to fight to file a complaint against our abuser, we shouldn’t have to fight to have a restraining order enforced, and we shouldn’t have to fight to be believed, just because our assailant has either the cash, or the connections to get away with it.
To those of you that are guilty of facilitating the dismissal of charges against perpetrators of gender-based violence and violation, I have one thing to ask you; what if it was your daughter?
Alice Elizabeth Taylor is the founder of The Balkanista.com
