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16 Days of Activism – Day 4: Maude Dikobe

On Day 4 of the 16 Days of Activism we speak to Maude Dikobe, gender activist and Senior Lecturer in Literature and the Expressive Arts of Africa and the African Disapora at the University of Botswana.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Maude Dikobe, I am a gender activist and gender researcher at the University of Botswana, where I chaired the Gender Policy Programme Committee (GPPC) from 2005 to 2013.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

 I love, advocate and train trainers on women’s empowerment and feminist activism both in and outside the academy. When I was chair of GPPC we always collaborated with Gender Affairs to commemorate the 16 Days.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

The Shiloh Project can relate to my work and activism through collaboration as exemplified by the joint-workshop which was held in Gaborone in collaboration with the Shiloh Project on ‘Rape, Culture, Religion and the Bible’ where the participants shared their views on rape in Botswana. The workshop was held on March 21, 2017. So we look forward as the University of Botswana for further collaboarations.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

 I write about GBV, see “Passion Killings: A Festering Sore on the Conscience of the Nation (2009) and “Treat ‘Em Rough” Gender and Heterosexual Violence in Calypso” (2008). As a gender activist and researcher, have worked with UNFPA Botswana to review GBV research project from 2008-2020.   I am also visible in platforms that lobby and advocate for equality and a society that has zero tolerance for GBV.

You can also watch my advocacy videos on YouTube.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 3: Caroline Blyth

Our third interview to mark the UN’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence is from co-director Caroline Blyth, senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Auckland.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I’m a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Auckland, and also participate in the Gender Studies programme there too. My teaching reflects my research to a great extent, and I focus on religion in popular culture, with a particular interest in issues of religion, gender and sexuality – how do religious communities and traditions impact socio-cultural perceptions of gender and sexuality? I also co-organize a student engagement project in the Faculty of Arts, which is called Hidden Perspectives: Bringing the Arts Out of the Closet. It’s a project inspired by the original Hidden Perspectives project developed by the fabulous folks at Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. With Hidden Perspectives Auckland, we have created an inclusive academic and social community for queer students at the University, where they can get involved in queering the Arts and making their voices heard.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

As Katie and Johanna have explained in their own interviews, the Shiloh Project is something Katie and I had spoken about starting quite a while ago, but we were able to push ideas into practice when we met up with the indomitable Johanna and some other wonderful colleagues (Emma Nagouse, Valerie Hobbs, and Jessica Keady) last year at a meeting in Leeds. So along with Katie and Johanna, I help run the Shiloh Project, and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of such an important project, or to work with such wonderful colleagues.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

A lot of my work to date has focused on gender violence in sacred texts, particularly the ways that biblical depictions of gender violence can echo the still very prevalent myths and misperceptions around gender violence that sustain contemporary rape cultures. When I started my PhD thesis on the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) back in 2005, I fully expected to be discussing the ways that social attitudes towards sexual violence had ‘moved on’ and become far more informed compared to biblical discourses of rape. But alas, I soon discovered this was not the case. And what frustrates me is that so many of the biblical traditions that do present really problematic ideologies around gender and gender violence are either ignored or excused by both religious communities and academic biblical scholars – as though their ‘sacred’ status rendered them beyond our critique. But, given how powerful the Bible remains as a religious and cultural text in global contemporary cultures, its problematic texts and traditions (which appear to endorse rape-supportive ideologies) urgently need to be addressed and discussed in both academic and wider public forums. Because these texts do still play a role in the world today, shaping popular perceptions about gender violence and granting validity to some really damaging discourses around rape and rape culture.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussions about gender activism today? 

I think that a massive strength of the Shiloh Project is that it rescues religious studies and biblical studies from the confines of the academy and offers academics, students, and interested members of the public an accessible (but still academically-rigorous) platform to talk openly and engagingly about a topic that remains so taboo. It’s not doing work that only a handful of like-minded academics can understand, but is really motivated to widening the discussion and fostering a sense of community and activism in which people both inside and outside the academy can participate. I think this is both vital for the future health of religious studies as an academic discipline, but also crucial to every academic’s role as critic and conscience of society and their responsibility is to make a difference – in my case, by tackling gender violence and encouraging activism that will make the world a safer and more inclusive place.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

I have two future projects in mind at the moment. I’m hoping to work with my colleague in Auckland, Emily Colgan (a fellow Project Shiloh member), on the problematic depictions of gender roles and relationships in conservative Christian literature, particularly ‘self-help’ literature and fiction. This is an incredibly popular and prolific genre, and what I’ve come across has fascinated (and appalled) me as to its re-inscription of traditional gender roles, as well as its perpetuation of some very common rape-supportive discourses.

I’m also currently focusing on a slightly different strand of gender violence, and that is the symbolic and structural violence of transphobia sustained by religious rhetoric (particularly conservative Christian rhetoric). There’s been a huge flurry of concern among conservative Christian communities around, what they term, the ‘transgender debate’. To my mind, this ‘debate’ essentially denies the existence of authentic trans identities and works to exclude trans people from the human community. Some of the discourses evoked in these discussions are really toxic, and play a significant role in perpetuating or validating the alarmingly high rates of transphobic violence that trans people have to live with on a daily basis. I’m wanting to interrogate this ‘transgender debate’ and highlight its potential for sustaining violence, not to mention its problematic engagements with sacred texts, theologies, and traditions. I hope too that my work can inspire some timely and urgent dialogues of reconciliation between queer and religious communities. A tall order, but I’m intent on gradually chipping away at the homophobic and transphobic edifices that remain so prevalent in many religious communities today.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 2: Katie Edwards

On Day 2 of 16 Days of Activism we interview project co-director, Katie Edwards.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I’m Katie Edwards and I’m a Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Sheffield Institute of Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS).

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

I co-direct the project with my friends and colleagues Caroline Blyth (University of Auckland) and Johanna Stiebert (University of Leeds). Caroline and I had talked for a while about developing a project or network around the Bible and sexual violence but our ideas didn’t take shape until we raised them with Johanna and other fabulous academics at a research day at Leeds and there The Shiloh Project was born.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

I’m grateful every day for my job. It pays the bills. It gives me a voice and a platform – both extremely precious things – and there are few jobs that support you to develop and disseminate your ideas. For example, Johanna and I are funded to work with really brilliant colleagues and collaborators in Botswana and Lesotho next year, after receiving funding to visit the Universities of Botswana and KwaZulu-Natal earlier this year. I’m keenly aware of the opportunities, status and privilege I have because of my job. Nevertheless, academia can, in pockets, be a competitive and unkind world and it’s not immune from the structural issues that affect the rest of society. Universities continue to struggle with serious problems of institutional racism, sexism, ableism and classism, despite public-facing diversity narratives. Before I started work in Higher Education I imagined that universities were a different, nobler space, less affected by inequalities and therefore harassment, sexual assault and bullying than other places of work. I was, of course, naive. Universities and academia remain highly protective of hierarchies, and we’re slow, and sometimes unwilling, to respond to clear inequalities in gender, race, class and disabilities in our institutions. This is a context, then, that helps to maintain a culture prone to harassment and bullying of junior colleagues, in particular. The Shiloh Project is in part, as well as being a shared area of research, a response to the culture of tolerance around harassment and bullying in HE that helps to support and perpetuate it. The vast majority of women have experienced sexual harassment at work and I’m no different. From my first full-time job working at a brewery at the age of 18 when the middle-aged ‘Business Development Managers’ took bets to see which one could get me to have sex and return with evidence, to my first permanent job in a university when a senior male colleague took photos of me with his mobile phone from across the table while I was trying to tell him about my research priorities for the next year. After a few further similar episodes with the senior male colleague, and with little support or guidance from colleagues who knew what was happening, I approached a very senior female colleague in the same institution to ask her advice. As a new member of staff on a probationary contract, in a precarious personal financial situation, I was scared for my and my family’s livelihood. The senior prof told me to never report sexual harassment because it would follow me for life but it was highly unlikely to impact the perpetrator. Her advice was that I should be ‘more charming’ to my then line-manager. Like everywhere else, academia can be isolating, especially when you’re facing harassment and bullying from people in positions of power. In light of our various experiences, the directors and members of The Shiloh Project wanted to create a supportive and inclusive research community and be visible, vocal and united in our stance against sexual violence, assault, harassment and bullying.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?

Johanna’s absolutely right that religion is often absent from discussions around gender activism and we aim to address that gap. The Shiloh Project has a range of expertise from Meredith Warren’s work on sexual violence in the Classics and the New Testament to Valerie Hobbs’ research into rape culture in church communities and I think we can make an important contribution to existing and future discussions around activism against gender-based violence.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

Next year is a busy one! Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan and I have a series of three edited volumes on religion and rape culture coming out with Palgrave Macmillan. Johanna and I will be developing our research project in Botswana and Lesotho and there’ll be a Radio 4 programme connected to our work on The Shiloh Project. I’m also working on a book looking at constructions of whiteness, purity and female sexuality and how these contribute to rape culture. I’m just really delighted to be part of this project and to work with such a fantastic group of people. My work, and friendship, with Johanna and Caroline gives me energy and motivates me to be bolder, more confident and more honest in my research. Something that took me a long time to come to – I spent much of the first few years of my time in academia feeling quite scared and wary of the culture I saw around me and my voice within it. I’m grateful to this project and to colleagues such as J. Cheryl Exum (University of Sheffield), Adriaan van Klinken (University of Leeds), Deryn Guest (University of Birmingham), Valerie Hobbs (University of Sheffield), Vanita Sundaram (University of York), Dawn Llewelyn (University of Chester), Rachel van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield), Emma Tomalin (University of Leeds), Richard Newton (Elizabethtown College) and Musa Dube (University of Botswana) whose work and activism inspires me every day.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 1: Johanna Stiebert

Today marks the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence Campaign. To commemorate, we’ll publish a profile of each of our project directors and members for every day of the campaign.

Our first interview is with project co-director Johanna Stiebert, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Leeds.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Johanna Stiebert and I research and teach on the Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds. I became an academic because I failed to make a career in human rights journalism and activism, which was my first quest.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

The Shiloh Project grew out of a conversation with two friends who are also colleagues, Katie Edwards and Caroline Blyth. Katie teaches biblical studies at the University of Sheffield and Caroline at the University of Auckland, in my native New Zealand. Katie is also Director of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, which, thanks in large part to her leadership, has a strong track-record in organising innovative and activist events focused around things biblical, and Caroline’s publications and teaching have a strong focus on feminist approaches, as well as on LGBTQI rights. Working with them is not only fun, it makes work meaningful.

Katie and Caroline, together with Emily Colgan, were already working on editing a multi-volume collection (forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan) of papers on religion and rape culture. We decided to hold a workshop in Leeds, which was attended by several more inspiring scholars – Nechama Hadari, Emma Nagouse, Valerie Hobbs and Jessica Keady – and it was there that we decided to launch The Shiloh Project and its blog, to create a forum and resource on religion, the Bible and rape culture. Since the launch, corresponding with contributors and readers and preparing posts for the blog has been one of my favourite work activities.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

It relates to my work in a number of ways. First, I have a long-standing interest in the topic of gender-based violence and the Bible. In my PhD dissertation already, I focused quite a lot of attention on the woman metaphor in Ezekiel 16 and 23. In these chapters the relationship between Israel’s God and Israel, or Judah, or Jerusalem, is depicted in terms of sexually promiscuous females (i.e. disobedient, abhorrent Israel) and violent men who ‘sort them out’ (i.e. God and the men who do his bidding). It’s appalling stuff.

Since then I have worked also on the image of the abused woman and man in Lamentations, on father-daughter relationships and, most recently, on the topic of incest and the Hebrew Bible. All of these have revolved around gender and power relations. I have also contributed a chapter to the rape-culture volumes, edited by Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan and Katie Edwards, on the motif of the eroticized sister and rape in both the Hebrew Bible and contemporary popular culture.

But it’s also more personal than just about my research, which has been primarily focused on antiquity. I am well conscious that sexualized violence is multi-dimensional and ever-present. Not only are there constant revelations of sexual violence against boys, girls, women and men – be it in the context of on-street grooming in Rotherham or Rochdale, or in football coaching, be it sex-trafficking of women from Eastern Europe, or scandals erupting in Hollywood or Westminster, or revelations from public schools, children’s homes, universities or the church. I also have children aged eleven and nine and am frequently startled at the disturbing sexualized language and images they encounter (and then ask difficult questions about) – in instagram posts or mainstreamed music videos.

All of this motivates me to make my work relevant to present-day injustices concerning sexism, gender-based injustice and violence. The Shiloh Project has been one way to focus this endeavour and to find other like-minded persons working on related topics.

It has been very satisfying to make activism part of my work and, luckily, my subject unit at Leeds is supportive of this, too. Several of my Leeds colleagues (Adriaan van Klinken, Emma Tomalin, Stefan Skrimshire, Rachel Muers…) integrate social justice activism into their research and teaching. In my view this is an important responsibility for universities – including for subject units teaching about religion.

Through the energy harnessed by this project I have also become involved with applying for a number of research grants to focus on discrete topics. Recently, Katie Edwards and I received funding to take forward a collaboration with scholars, NGOs and women’s rights groups in Yorkshire, Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho. We are also seeking collaborations with the University of Ghana and with the White Rose consortium (working across the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and York) to create networks and conduct research and grassroots projects to facilitate more critical understanding of and resistance to gender-based violence and inequality.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?

There is clearly a considerable need for gender activism. So much needs to be done. The dimension of religion, however, is often neglected. And yet, religious beliefs and imagery play quite a significant role in terms of shaping gender stereotypes and values. My colleague Emma Tomalin (at Leeds) is leading projects on how matters of religion interface with public health, with gender (e.g. in discussions of sex trafficking, dowries and on-street grooming) and development (particularly the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals) and I am persuaded that much more needs to be done to identify, understand and evaluate the influence of religion in all kinds of gender dynamics. Again, working with Katie and Caroline has made me think about this topic along new lines. Katie has done a lot of work on how popular culture distils and reflects cultural manifestations of gender values, while Caroline has recently demonstrated the impact of religious values (particularly of a very socially conservative brand) on gender public politics.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

My next project is to look at contemporary rape myths and to examine how they relate to depictions in the Bible. I am starting with the myth that women often make false allegations – either because they are resentful at having sexual advances rejected, or because they want to abnegate blame for consensually entered into sexual misconduct they later regret. Yes, false rape allegations do happen – but they are far less common than claims about them. I am looking at the story of Potiphar’s wife right now (Genesis 39) in which she demands Joseph have sex with her, he rejects her, and she then claims he attempted to rape her. I’ll be giving the Humboldt Lecture at the University of Bamberg in the new year based on this topic. If you’re in Bamberg on 18 April at 6pm, come along.

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Graphic representations of rape in biblical comics

Zanne Domoney-Lyttle is a tutor in Biblical Studies, including Biblical Hebrew language, at the University of Glasgow, and is currently working towards her PhD on the representation of the Bible in Comic Books (Theology & Religious Studies/Stirling Maxwell Center for Text-Image Narratives). She is passionate about reading the Bible as a contemporary cultural product, both in terms of adaptation and re appropriation of biblical material in our society.

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Biblical comics – that is, adaptations of biblical material into comic book formats – have become increasingly popular in recent decades. In the past ten years alone, W.W. Norton has published The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb (2009), Siku wrote and illustrated The Manga Bible (2009), and a group of creators are currently working on producing a digital word-for-word Bible which claims to be historically accurate, unabridged, and “untamed.” Many more adaptations exist, many more are in the process of being created, and the market for text-image Bible shows no sign of slowing down.
It is easy to see why: the Bible is full of graphical, fantastical, easily visualised and emotionally charged stories, all of which provide great fodder for comics’ artists and writers to use either in “straightforward” retellings (and I use that term tongue-in-cheek with regards to biblical material) like Crumb’s Genesis, Illustrated, or for biblically-inspired stories like Goliath by Tom Gauld, which narrates the battle of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) from the giant’s point of view.

Like any form of literary or visual adaptation, creators of biblical comics have to pick and choose which stories to tell, which characters to include, and most importantly, which bits to leave out of their adaptations. For the majority of biblical comics on the market, that tends to mean leaving out scenes of sexual assault and rape. Of the 30 or so biblical comics which sit on my physical and digital shelf, only two include scenes of rape: R. Crumb’s “word-for-word” interpretation of Genesis means he had to include the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34, as well as Genesis 16 where Hagar the slave-concubine is given to Abraham for the purpose of producing an heir; an event which many biblical scholars interpret as rape owing to Hagar’s subservient status meaning she has no free will to accept or refuse. The other comic is The Book of Judges, a digital comic by Simon Amadeus et al. Also a “word-for-word” Bible comic, the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 is graphically depicted across two pages, in full colour.

Most other biblical comics avoid such difficult scenes. For the reader, this is potentially problematic. In a recent article for The Conversation, Dr. Katie Edwards and Dr. Meredith Warren discussed the problems of leaving out the more gruesome, violent, or sexual aspects of the Bible when children are exposed to the text, arguing that encouraging close, critical readings of the text would give young people the tools to address issues of violence, slavery and even genocide in our own time.

This can and should also be applied to visualisations of sexual assault in biblical comics; after all, other graphic narratives concerning genocide (Noah’s flood, Genesis 6:9 – 9:17), slavery (the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, book of Exodus) and violence (for example, Genesis 4, when Cain murders Abel) are frequently re-presented in biblical comics. So why do comic creators stay clear of sexually-orientated scenes of violence?

One answer might lie in the fact that comic books are often still seen as children’s items; there is a wealth of material that argues against this notion (both inside and outside of academia) and thankfully, it is not as prevalent an opinion anymore. However, that comic books stem from a tradition pertaining to children’s literature still potentially influences their content, and so leaving out sexually explicit subjects might seem safer in order to “protect” a younger audience from difficult content.

Still, the question remains as to why certain forms of violence are deemed appropriate over other types of violence. Conversely, it must be noted that comics are, as highlighted above, no longer the domain of children. Markets are moving towards young adult/adult readers which, if it is the case, somewhat negates the argument that creators must be cautious of sensitive material influencing young minds. Leaving out scenes of sexual violence might be less to do with perceived readership, in that case, and more to do with the creators themselves.

To visually and textually represent a scene of violence from the Bible is difficult enough; to visually and textually represent a scene of rape or sexual assault from the Bible requires the creator to not only interpret and imagine the scene, but to recreate the act. It is the creator or the team of creators who must physically draw Dinah being raped (Genesis 34), for example, which makes them complicit in the act of rape. Complicity may be more pronounced in the act of creating text-image narratives of rape and sexual assault than it is in translating or transcribing, because the visual image is often more visceral than word alone. The creator[s] must figuratively and literally picture how the scene looks; their hands physically transmit the violent act on to paper where it is apprehended instantaneously and directly, without the “cover” of words. In a similar way, the reader also becomes complicit in the act by reading the text and image, and by physically handling and turning pages, effectively allowing the story – and the rape – to continue.

The lack of re-presenting biblical rape narratives in comic books, then, is perhaps just as important as their inclusion in biblical comics. By not including them, the creator of the book is choosing not to become complicit in a sexually violent act, and at the same time, preventing the reader from having to experience the rape, themselves becoming complicit in the continuation of the story’s intimate violence. Conversely, choosing to include rape and sexual assault in biblical retellings is giving a voice and a face to the victim, who otherwise, would remain silent and faceless.

Giving a voice to a victim of sexual assault or rape is essential, especially in the current climate. On an almost-daily basis, new revelations and allegations concerning sexual assault and rape appear in our newsfeeds, and the victims of such crimes are often unable to present their case – either because they are silenced or because they lack the ability or opportunity to present the wrong done to them. Visualising biblical rape narratives, if nothing else, may be a way to present cases of sexual assault and rape, forcing readers to confront the wrongs done to victims, be they historical, current, or even fictional.

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Abandonment, Rape, and Second Abandonment: Hannah Baker in 13 Reasons Why and King David’s Concubines in 2 Samuel 15–20

David Tombs is Professor of Theology and Public Issues, as well as Director for the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand). He is passionate about contextual and liberation theologies and author of Latin American Liberation Theologies (Brill, 2002). Recently, David has been working on intersections of religion, violence and public theology – particularly, on Christian responses to gender-based violence, sexual abuse and torture.

 Abandonment, Rape, and Second Abandonment: Hannah Baker in 13 Reasons Why and King David’s Concubines in 2 Samuel 15–20[1]

The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (2017) sparked headlines and prompted considerable concern and criticism from viewers. However, the controversy surrounding the series did little to dampen its appeal, and the show proved so popular that a second series was announced for 2018. Based on the young adult novel, Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher (2007),[i] it tells the fictional story of high school student Hannah Baker who takes her life after a series of events that she describes on a sequence of cassette tapes. She arranges for the tapes to be circulated among a group of students at her school whom she names on a list. Each student is asked to listen to all the tapes, learn how they (the students) have contributed to her decision to end her life, and then send them on to the next person on the list. The viewer shares the point of view of Hannah’s friend, Clay Jensen, as he listens to the tapes. The timeframe goes back and forth between Clay’s experiences as he listens and Hannah’s experience of each decisive event.

The series’ engaging and suspenseful format has proved a huge hit with teen and young adult audiences. Some viewers, however, including a number of mental health organisations, strongly criticized the way it depicts Hannah’s suicide, including the length of the scene and its graphic detail. There has been particular concern that when young audiences watch they might see it as glorifying suicide, or legitimating suicide as a solution to difficult life events. Moreover, some critics have argued that the series fails to address many of the issues commonly involved in suicide, such as depression and other forms of mental illness. In New Zealand, these concerns led to the Classification Office creating a new PR18 category rating for the show, which prohibits (or at least warns against) young people under the age of eighteen watching the series without parental guidance. The Classification Office cited the portrayal of suicide and its aftermath as a real risk for teen viewers who may be struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts.

The questions and concerns raised over the representation of suicide in 13 Reasons Why are important, especially in a country like New Zealand, where suicide rates are the highest in the developed world. In 2016–17 the figure was 606 suicides: the highest rate since figures began to be recorded in 2007–08. Yet these discussions around the series’ depiction of suicide also need to be set in context. 13 Reasons Why is not primarily about Hannah’s suicide; rather, it is her life experiences prior to her death that are central. In contrast to the public attention that has been given to her suicide, there has been relatively little discussion about the thirteen events she speaks about and the impact that these had on her. As the story develops, Hannah explains that even though some of these experiences were relatively incidental, they had a cumulative effect upon her. She states, “I recorded twelve tapes. I started with Justin and Jessica who each broke my heart. Alex, Tyler, Courtney, Marcus who each helped to destroy my reputation. On through Zach and Ryan, who broke my spirit. Through tape number twelve, Bryce Walker, who broke my soul” (Netflix 2017, Episode 13, cassette 7 side A).

The public focus on the portrayal of Hannah’s suicide, rather than on the reasons underlying it, are perhaps due to the fact that these involve her experiences of the often-taboo topic of gendered violence and rape culture, including sexual shaming, objectification, invasion of privacy, groping, harassment, and rape. Hannah dwells on each of these experiences in turn, using one side of a cassette to explain how they have affected her. Here I am focusing on one of these events in particular—namely, Hannah’s rape by fellow student Bryce Walker in a hot tub at a student party—and consider its place in her story. My approach is to “read” Hannah’s story in dialogue with a biblical story, in which I see similar themes around gender-based violence emerging, particularly in relation to the theme of abandonment. This dialogical approach, in which we allow the biblical text and Hannah’s experience to speak to and illuminate each other, can reveal how they each attest to the devastating impact of gender-based violence on victims’ lives and identities.[ii]

While in no way wishing to minimize the harm done by the violence itself, my primary intention is to broaden the focus and explore the harm that is often caused by both the actions of others in precipitating sexual violence and the reactions of others in the aftermath of sexual violence. Both these actions and reactions can be seen as forms of abandonment. Indeed, it is Hannah’s sense of abandonment after the event that is Hannah’s all important ‘thirteenth reason’ (cassette 7 suicide A, episode 13). An attentive reading of what happens to Hannah both before and after her rape suggests that the actions and responses by other people require far more scrutiny than they usually receive.[iii]

The first part of what follows identifies a three-step framework for viewing Hannah’s rape and its effects upon her. First, Hannah’s classmates physically abandon her when they leave her alone in the hot tub after the party. Secondly, Bryce rapes her. Thirdly, she feels a “second abandonment” by both her classmates and the school guidance counsellor, Mr Porter, of whom she hoped that he would offer her some much-needed help. I then use the same three-step framework (abandonment—rape—second abandonment) as a lens to read three biblical passages in 2 Samuel (15:13–16; 16:20−3; 20:3). These passages relate the tradition of the ten concubines in King David’s royal household, who are abandoned by David, raped by Absalom, and then abandoned again by David.[iv] In the second part of the chapter, I explore whether the biblical reading can offer additional insights back into Hannah’s story, particularly in terms of her double abandonment. I suggest that in addition to David failing the concubines after their rape, he may also have been more culpable in leaving them to their fate than first appears. That is, he may have knowingly left the concubines as an offering to Absalom. This interpretation also offers a new perspective on the culpability of Hannah’s classmate Courtney Crimsen in the events that led to Hannah’s rape.

Hannah Baker: Twice Abandoned

Hannah describes her rape by Bryce on Cassette 6, side B: the basis of Episode 12 in the Nextflix series, and of Chapter 12 in the book. She sees the rape as the culmination of other experiences she has already described in previous tapes. These begin with the rumours that circulate about her sexual promiscuity after Justin lies to his friends about what happened on their first date.[v] Shortly afterwards, she experiences sexual objectification when her name is added by another student to a “Who’s Hot/Who’s Not” list as “Best Ass in Freshman Class”. This in turn leads to two separate incidents where fellow students Marcus and Bryce touch her inappropriately. In the tape, Hannah says that each of these experiences builds on the previous one. After her rape, she feels she has eventually become the person that others already believed her to be. This event (or at least the version of it that will be told by Bryce) will finally validate the rumours that have already made her life so miserable.

Hannah’s initial abandonment

Hannah was not planning to attend the student party, but after having a row with her parents, she goes out for a walk and is eventually drawn to it by its sounds. In the series, the party is at Bryce’s house. Hannah sees a group of people she knows relaxing in the garden hot tub—Jessica, Justin, Zach, and Stephanie. They invite her over and encourage her to join them. When she demurs, they reassure her that she does not need a swimsuit, since they are all just wearing underwear. After a while, however, the others in the group gradually get out of the hot tub for various reasons and go back into the house, leaving Hannah in the hot tub by herself.[vi] While they might not intend to abandon her in this potentially vulnerable situation, abandonment is, nonetheless, one of the consequences of their actions. Before Hannah can follow them, Bryce appears and climbs into the hot tub next to her.

In the novel, the party is at Courtney’s house rather than Bryce’s. Courtney and Bryce are in the hot tub when Hannah arrives, and the other classmates have already left. Courtney’s subsequent decision to leave Hannah alone with Bryce (a student known for his sexually predatory behaviour) is more ethically ambiguous and raises questions about her motivations. I will return to this issue later.

Hannah’s rape

When Bryce and Hannah are alone in the hot tub, they talk for a bit, but soon Bryce starts to touch her. Hannah does not want this but Bryce persists, eventually forcing himself upon her. As Hannah recalls on the cassette: “Bryce, you had to see my jaw clench. You had to see my tears. Does that kind of shit turn you on?” In the novel, there is some attention to the complexity of Hannah’s thinking and feelings about her rape, and little reference to Bryce’s use of physical force:

I did not say no or push his hand away. All I did was turn my head, clench my teeth, and fight back tears. And he saw that. He even told me to relax … And that’s all you needed, Bryce. You started kissing my shoulder, my neck, sliding your fingers in and out. And then you kept going. You didn’t stop there (Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why, New York: Razorbill, 2007, p.265).

In the television series, however, Bryce uses obvious force. When he gets into the hot tub, Hannah tells him that she had “better get going” and stands up to leave, but Bryce tugs at her arm to get her to stay. When Hannah sits back down, Bryce starts to fondle her bra and again, Hannah says, “Sorry, I got to go.” She turns to climb out of the hot tub but he grabs her arm again, this time with enough force for her to lose her balance. He traps her against the side of the tub and pulls her hair while he rapes her. When she gets home and undresses, there are red marks on her arms and shoulders.

Hannah’s second abandonment

The rape leaves Hannah distraught and overwhelmed. She understands it as a progression and consequence of other ways she has been objectified, harassed and mistreated during her time at school. It leads her to write down the names of the people involved in the different events that have occurred and to figure out the connections between them. One of the positive outcomes from this is that she recognises her need for support if she is to cope with these traumatic incidents. She decides to approach the school counsellor, Mr Porter, in a final attempt to seek help. Despite her turmoil about all that has happened, she has not yet decided to take her life.

In the series, Hannah describes her meeting with Mr Porter on Cassette 7 Side A (Episode 13). She initially tells him how she is feeling, describing herself as “lost and sort of empty”. She then goes on to recount some details about what happened with Bryce. Hannah does not use the word “rape” here, but she starts to cry and it is clear that she is talking about something serious. Mr Porter is depicted as well intentioned and genuinely concerned, but he fails to ask the right questions. He initially thinks Hannah made a decision about having sex with someone that she now regrets. Hannah flatly rejects this. He then asks, “Did he force himself on you?” Hannah replies, “I think so”. Instead of taking this at face value, Mr Porter undermines what she is saying, by replying, “You think so, but you are not sure”. He then asks if she told the person to stop or said “no” to him, and Hannah says that she did not, without expanding further.[vii] Mr Porter then suggests that perhaps she consented but then changed her mind. Hannah tells him it wasn’t like that, but instead of asking her what it was like, he presses her to tell him the boy’s name. Hannah hesitates, and then asks Mr Porter to promise that the boy will go to jail and she will never have to face him again. Mr Porter acknowledges that he is unable to do this, and can only promise to do everything in his power to protect her. He asks again for the boy’s name but Hannah will not give it. Mr Porter fails here to recognize the signs of Hannah’s desperation, despite her telling him that she is tired of life.

Eventually, since Hannah continues to refuse to say who raped her, and remains adamant that she does not want her parents involved, Mr Porter suggests that “moving on” is her only option if she does not wish to report her assault. Hannah interprets this as the end of the conversation and rises to leave. Mr Porter encourages her to stay, but she says that they have figured it out and she does indeed need to “move on”. Despite his good intentions, Mr Porter leaves Hannah feeling alone and in a state of despair. She exits his office and closes the door behind her, waiting outside to see if he will come after her and offer further help or support. When he does not appear, she feels her isolation and abandonment is complete. As she puts it on Cassette 4 Side A (Episode 7), “The kind of lonely I’m talking about is when you feel you have got nothing left. Nothing and no-one. Like you’re drowning, and no-one will throw you a line.” In the novel, she initially tells Mr. Porter that she wants “everything to stop. People. Life.” When Porter seems alarmed by these words, Hannah responds by telling him “I don’t want my life to end. That’s why I’m here” (Asher 2007: 272−73). Mr Porter is her final resort, and when she feels he abandons her, she decides that there is no alternative but to take her own life. As she puts it: “I think I’ve made myself very clear, but no one’s stepping forward to stop me … A lot of you cared, just not enough” (Asher 2007: 279).

The Twice Abandoned Concubines of 2 Samuel

This threefold narrative pattern of abandonment, rape, and second abandonment recounted in 13/Thirteen Reasons Why is likewise evoked in the biblical tradition about David’s ten concubines. In 2 Samuel 15:13, we are introduced to these women, whom David left to look after his house when he fled from his son Absalom. We subsequently hear about their fate in two very brief passages (16:21-23 and 20:3). The biblical narrative is not terribly interested in the story of these women, nor does it treat them as characters in their own right. Their story—mentioned cursorily in only a few verses over six chapters—affirms that they form a fragment, or aside, in what the narrator sees as the more central story of a competition for power between men: David’s conflict with Absalom and Absalom’s attempt to usurp David from the Israelite throne. Yet if we look closely at these three passages, we can see they follow the same three-phase sequence of abandonment, rape, and second abandonment that unfolds in Hannah’s story.

The abandonment of the concubines

A messenger came to David, saying, “The hearts of the Israelites have gone after Absalom.” Then David said to all his officials who were with him at Jerusalem, “Get up! Let us flee, or there will be no escape for us from Absalom. Hurry, or he will soon overtake us, and bring disaster down upon us, and attack the city with the edge of the sword.” The king’s officials said to the king, “Your servants are ready to do whatever our lord the king decides.” So the king left, followed by all his household, except ten concubines whom he left behind to look after the house (2 Samuel 15:13-16).

The story of Absalom’s rebellion against his father David is part of a much longer sequence of family betrayals and broken alliances related by the narrator of 1 and 2 Samuel.[viii] When David hears about Absalom’s growing popularity in Israel, he decides to flee, fearing that Absalom is about to bring disaster upon him, his adherents, and the city (v.14).[ix] He leaves, we are told, with his “household” in tow, except for ten concubines, whom he leaves to “look after the house” (v.16). The total number of concubines David had in Jerusalem is not specified, so it is unclear whether these ten women constitute all of his concubines or whether there were others who accompany him and his primary wives on the household flight.[x] Since Absalom was expected to “attack the city with the edge of a sword,” it is clear that David was leaving these women in a perilous predicament. My use of the word “abandoned” here is therefore appropriate: David’s intention may not have been to leave them defenceless and exposed to danger or sexual violence, but this was nonetheless a clearly predictable consequence of his actions. Yet in this narrative, focus is placed on the urgency of David’s flight (and the question mark hanging over his fate), rather than on the vulnerability of the ten women – hence, this is where the reader’s attention is directed.

The rape of the concubines

Then Absalom said to Ahithophel, “Give us your counsel; what shall we do?” Ahithophel said to Absalom, “Go in to your father’s concubines, the ones he has left to look after the house; and all Israel will hear that you have made yourself odious to your father, and the hands of all who are with you will be strengthened.” So they pitched a tent for Absalom upon the roof; and Absalom went in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel. Now in those days the counsel that Ahithophel gave was as if one consulted the oracle of God; so all the counsel of Ahithophel was esteemed, both by David and by Absalom (2 Sam. 16:20–3).

Rape of the concubines is part of the political strategy advised by Ahithophel, an admired counselor. It is performed by Absalom, the king’s popular son. It is not called rape and is depicted in passing, in terms of Absalom “[going] in to [them]”. There is no further description and no insight into the women’s perspective or experience. It is easy to read on, without dwelling on the matter, or imagining its violence and indignity.

Ahithophel’s words here can be interpreted in different ways. The degree of force and physical violence that “going into” the concubines might involve is not specified. There is insufficient detail given for the reader to discern if the rapes were enacted in full view of the public or if they took place out of sight. Ahithophel speaks of Israel “hearing” about this event, but the narrator then tells us that Absalom “went into” the concubines “in sight of all Israel”. Whether or not this last phrase should be taken literally is unclear. Nevertheless, the passage leaves open the possibility of an orchestrated spectacle of public rape to signal the power and virility of Absalom as a military conqueror.[xi] An alternative reading is that the tent would offer privacy, and what happened inside was closer to a (wedding?) ritual to establish the women as Absalom’s possession. This arguably more benign reading, however, would still involve rape, or perhaps rape marriage. Even if “rape” is not the term that might have been used at the time, to modern sensibilities this remains an act of sexual domination by Absalom and of failure to secure consent from the concubines – hence, rape.

Likewise, there might be different interpretations of how Absalom’s public rape of David’s concubines will “strengthen the hands” of Absalom’s followers. Will these followers be filled with admiration (or fear) at the supposed “manliness” of Absalom’s actions? Is this a public display that seals Absalom’s superior power and authority over his father, demonstrating David’s inability to protect “his” women? Whatever the reason, neither Absalom nor Ahithophel give any thought to the effect Absalom’s actions will have on the ten concubines: their sole concern is that the event will be “odious” to David.[xii]

Absalom would surely have been aware of the devastating impact of rape on women, given that he witnessed the “desolate” state of his sister Tamar after her sexual assault by Amnon (2 Samuel 13:20). It does not seem to cross his mind, however, that he will be inflicting the same desolation on these ten women. Such indifference is also apparent in the narrator’s response to these events, as the text reveals nothing from the women’s perspective. What was going through their minds when David left them behind after he fled from Absalom with the rest of his family? Did they anticipate what would happen to them? Were they afraid? Did they try to protect themselves, or seek help? Did they cry out in fear when Absalom approached them? Did they plead with him or try to fight him off? And how did they feel after he raped them? Were they shocked, angry, and in pain? Did they speak to each other about what happened, or try to console each other? The narrator remains silent about these matters, inviting the reader too, perhaps, to pay little heed to these women’s abandonment and assault.

The concubines’ second abandonment

David came to his house at Jerusalem; and the king took the ten concubines whom he had left to look after the house, and put them in a house under guard, and provided for them, but did not go in to them. So they were shut up until the day of their death, living as if in widowhood (2 Samuel 20:3).

After Absalom rapes the ten concubines, the action moves swiftly to his ill-fated pursuit of David and his eventual defeat, flight, and death. Absalom’s death causes David renewed grief but allows him to return to Jerusalem and reclaim his throne. On his return, we are told that he shuts the ten women up under some form of house arrest, and never sleeps with them again. Some might read this as relatively benign treatment, given that David provides for the women and offers them protection. Yet the statement that he did not “go in to them” but rather left them to live “as if in widowhood” suggests he sees them as in some sense irreparably damaged or taboo. Under the honour-shame code that permeated this ancient Near Eastern culture, the women would have been viewed as damaged goods or defiled, their sexuality having been “misused” by a man other than their husband. The shame associated with their defilement would have transferred to David—the “owner” of their sexuality.[xiii] This was likely Absalom’s intention. David was the primary target of Absalom’s public display. David seems to accept that the women’s defilement cannot be reversed or the stigma removed, so he endeavours to contain or mitigate its impact, to some extent at least, by isolating the women. The guard whom he sets over their house may have been more their jailer than their protector; this is hinted at in the last sentence, when the narrator tells us that the women were “shut up until the day of their death”. This term conveys little in the way of protection or care, but instead conjures up images of imprisonment, or even entombment.

David’s actions need to be understood against the values of the honour-shame code of the day, and against the contagious stigma associated with sexual defilement. David’s reaction could, of course, have been even harsher: he might have executed the women, for instance. Even so, this does not mean that his response should be either ignored or excused. As concubines in the royal household, the ten women would not have had the power or authority to question or confront David about their treatment. Nevertheless, a contemporary reader is entitled, indeed obliged, to consider the events in this tradition from these women’s perspective, and not just from David’s (as appears to be the narrator’s intention). Being secluded for the rest of their lives seems tantamount to a punishment, and we are left wondering if David blames these women for the violence to which they were subjected.

Moreover, to excuse David’s response as understandable in its historical context—in keeping with the social dynamics of the honour-shame code—is to miss the ethical challenge posed by 2 Samuel 20:3. Rather, David’s behaviour needs to be recognised as a misguided and damaging reaction to sexual violence, prompted by assumptions that are still prevalent within contemporary rape cultures, and which still need to be challenged. Shame should attach to the perpetrators of sexual violence not to the victims. David’s reaction, driven by his wish to protect his own honour, has disastrous consequence for the women. Just as Tamar, following the rape, becomes “a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom’s house” (2 Samuel 13:20), so the concubines become sequestered and hidden away “shut up until the day of their death, living as if in widowhood” (2 Samuel 20:3). It should be unacceptable that shame and stigma attaches to the victims of rape – not to the rapists and not to David, who let both rape victims down. Far from challenging the dynamics of gender and power linking the rape of Tamar to the rape of the royal concubines, David’s decision to seclude the concubines only reinforces these dynamics further.

Moreover, David’s attitude to the concubines in 2 Samuel 20:3 is often passed over as an irrelevant aside in the succession narrative. The narrator keeps our focus firmly on David and on his sons, thereby eclipsing the female characters. A more attentive reading, however, shows that there is more at stake. It is David’s abandonment of his concubines in the aftermath of their rape, not just Absalom’s initial act of rape, which requires ethical scrutiny.[xiv]

In a similar way, contemporary survivors of sexual violence who turn to their community for help or compassion are often subjected to blame, stigma, and social rejection rather than supportive inclusion.[xv] The initial trauma caused by sexual violence is thereby reinforced afterwards through the secondary victimization at the hands of people who might instead offer comfort and support. Perpetrators, typically, can rely on negative reactions of others to heighten the impact of their actions on individuals and communities. This should be of particular concern to Christian churches and other religious communities, whose own responses to sexual violence often reinforce stigmatization and discrimination felt by survivors of sexual violence. As Elisabet Le Roux writes:

Many, if not most, churches are promoting sexual violence through their teachings, practices and response to sexual violence survivors, for example by admonishing those who disclose violations and ordering them to keep it secret. Unfortunately, those churches that choose non-involvement actually also contribute to the continuation of sexual violence. By not condemning it they are implicitly condoning the beliefs, perceptions and activities that facilitate sexual violence.

Hence, addressing such secondary victimization is one of the most appropriate and effective contributions that churches and faith-based organisations can make to support survivors of sexual violence and to challenge the rape-supportive discourses that sustain such violence.

As a means of examining the destructive impact of rape and the ways that rape trauma can be reinforced by subsequent responses of others, a hot tub scene in a popular Netflix series seems very remote from a dynastic battle in an ancient biblical narrative. Yet despite their markedly different geographical and historical locations, we can still discern shared tropes of sexual violence and re-traumatizing social responses to it within these two texts, suggesting that they have much more in common than might first appear. As I outlined above, there are three steps to Hannah’s experience of gender violence: first, she was physically abandoned by her friends and rendered vulnerable to being raped; secondly, she experienced rape; and thirdly, she felt socially abandoned and isolated after her rape. In particular, she was failed by the school counsellor Mr Porter when she turned to him in a last-ditch attempt to seek help. Like David, though, Mr Porter (if metaphorically) closed the door on her.

Considering 13/Thirteen Reasons Why intertextually alongside the story of David’s concubines allows us to read this biblical tradition with fresh insights, and we begin to see that these women’s story parallels each of the stages in Hannah’s story. Of course, important differences as well as similarities exist between the two texts. For example, while viewers and readers of 13/Thirteen Reasons Why are granted intimate insight into Hannah’s experience of sexual violence (though some have argued that Hannah’s experience is actually filtered through Clay’s interpretation) Samuel 20:3 does not report the inner world of David’s concubines at all: their point of view is completely absent from the narrative. We are given no details about how their experiences of sexual violence and their double abandonment affected them—physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Instead, the narrator chooses to focus on male perspectives: Ahithophel’s counsel, Absalom’s execution and David’s reaction to their rape.

Re-reading Thirteen Reasons Why in the Light of 2 Samuel

Having explored how Hannah’s story might offer a lens for reading the biblical passages in a similar framework of double abandonment and secondary victimization, the following section offers an interpretive reading in the opposite direction: what light might this biblical story shed on our understanding of gender violence in 13/Thirteen Reasons Why? Here the focus will turn from the “second abandonment” and the harm done by those who fail to respond appropriately to survivors (David and Mr Porter), to the possibility that some characters may have an even more direct culpability for the violence itself. This involves a further examination of David’s role in his first abandonment of the concubines, and Courtney Crimsen’s abandonment of Hannah in the novel.

An intentional offering by David?

As mentioned above, David’s first abandonment of his ten concubines occurs when he leaves them behind to look after the palace while he flees from the city with the rest of the household. What are his motivations for doing so? Since the narrator does not offer an explanation, David’s decision begs further questions. Why does his house need to be looked after? Is he concerned about protecting his property from looters, or from Absalom and his forces, or someone else altogether? Furthermore, how exactly would the ten women protect the household? Did David assume that they had sufficient authority and influence, given their status as members of the royal court, to deter potential intruders, even Absalom himself? It seems unlikely.

It is possible that David left other household staff (soldiers or servants) with the women to provide for their physical security. But if this is so, it receives no mention in the narrative. The narrator may simply have left it out, focusing solely on the fate of the women because this has the most direct bearing on David’s honour. But the sense of their vulnerability—their aloneness—is accentuated in 2 Samuel 15:16, where David is said to leave his house, “followed by all his household, except ten concubines whom he left behind”.

Another possibility for understanding David’s abandonment of the ten women is to consider it in the light of the ideologies underpinning rape during warfare. Particularly in recent decades, the rape of civilians and military personnel by enemy combatants has rightly received increasing scrutiny and condemnation in both the media and in academic and political discussions around human rights during armed conflict.[xvi] Other forms of sexual violence associated with conflict have also come to the fore, including sexual slavery, trafficking, and forced prostitution. War is not required for women’s bodies to be commodified and traded by men in these ways, but it often contributes towards making such gendered violence more prevalent. For example, during times of conflict, military leaders can use women as payment to reward their followers or bribe those whom they need to influence.[xvii] Might David have intended to leave the ten concubines for Absalom—an intentional gift, bribe, or offering from one warlord to another? Was David willing to explore some form of pact or power-share with his son, and therefore attempted to “sweeten the deal” by gifting him “his” women? Perhaps he saw these women as an acceptable price to buy Absalom off, or to soften his anger, or even to distract him temporarily from pursuing his father.

Viewing David’s decision to leave his ten concubines behind as an intentional offering for Absalom presents his action in an even more negative light than if he had left them behind with unintentional unconcern for their safety and wellbeing. Admittedly, this reading has to be tentative and there is a degree of speculation at stake. Nonetheless, it would offer an answer to David’s otherwise ambiguous decision, and if correct, it may also be suggestive for a re-reading of Hannah’s own abandonment prior to her rape in the Thirteen Reasons Why novel.

 What was Courtney thinking?!

As noted above, the Thirteen Reasons Why novel and the series locate the party Hannah attends at different people’s houses. In the series, it takes place at Bryce’s house, while in the novel, it is held at the home of fellow student Courtney Crimsen. Courtney has already featured in the story, especially on Cassette 2 Side B and Cassette 3 Side A (Episodes 5–6). On Cassette 2 Side B, Hannah and Courtney had collaborated to expose the school year book photographer, Tyler, who was stalking Hannah and taking photos of her. Hannah therefore hoped that she and Courtney could become friends. Instead, Courtney spreads false sexual rumours about Hannah, which further reinforces the damage to Hannah’s reputation.

In the novel, Courtney and Bryce are already in the hot tub when Hannah arrives. Bryce invites Hannah to join them, and Courtney encourages her and offers to give Hannah a ride home afterwards. Courtney’s subsequent decision to leave Hannah alone with Bryce raises questions about her complicity in Bryce’s sexual assault, which follows shortly after. Of course, Courtney may not have realized that leaving Hannah with Bryce places Hannah at risk of Bryce’s unwanted attentions.[xviii] Nevertheless, there are a number of other clues in the novel that imply Courtney may have been more complicit than Hannah’s own comments suggest. For example, when Hannah initially joins Bryce and Courtney, she makes clear that she distrusts both of them:[xix]

With the calming water also came terror, I should not be here. I didn’t trust Courtney. I didn’t trust Bryce. No matter what their original intentions, I knew them each well enough not to trust them for long. And I was right not to trust them (Asher 2007: 261–62).

Hannah also observes that Courtney’s “perfect” exterior masks something less pleasant. Hannah has noticed “the little smiles on [their] faces” when she first encounters Bryce and Courtney in the hot tub (Asher 2007: 261), hinting at a certain complicity between the two. Courtney’s intentions are further suggested as the scene develops. When Bryce slowly slides over next to Hannah and rests his shoulder against hers, Hannah recalls that “Courtney opened her eyes, looked at us, then shut them again” (Asher 2007: 262). Bryce says Hannah’s name in a soft voice, which Hannah interprets as “an obvious attempt at romance” (ibid.). His fingers touch her thigh, she clenches her jaw and his fingers move away. Then, when he tries again, Hannah opens her eyes and sees that “Courtney was walking away” (Asher 2007: 263). When Clay hears this on the cassette, he comments: “Do you need more reasons for everyone to hate you, Courtney?” (Asher 2007: 264).

Courtney does not leave Hannah alone with Bryce until he has begun sexually harassing Hannah.[xx] At best, Courtney might mistakenly believe that Hannah’s silence in the hot tub indicates consent. Shutting her eyes when she sees Bryce move next to Hannah and then leaving the hot tub may therefore be her way of giving them some privacy.[xxi] It is possible that Courtney is not expecting Bryce to assault Hannah sexually, but it is equally possible that Courtney is actively complicit in offering him this opportunity. Hannah describes how much Courtney wants to be popular, and Bryce is one of the most influential boys at the school. Perhaps, then, Courtney’s departure is, like David’s gift to Absalom, a tacit sexual “offering” motivated by her own self-interest. In David’s case, it is an attempt to save his own skin, whereas Courtney’s motivation is harder to guess at. It is possible that she is paying Hannah back after Hannah’s earlier rebuke when Courtney spread rumours about her. Or perhaps Courtney is simply ingratiating herself with Bryce, by giving him the opportunity to carry out an act (raping Hannah) that, deep down, she knows he wants to commit.

Courtney’s abandonment of Hannah raises the same disturbing questions as David’s (first) abandonment of the concubines. In each case, the abandonment might be more calculated and callous than first appears. To be sure, the fate of the concubines, and of Hannah, is the same –rape – whether the abandonment is intentional or not. Nevertheless, the question marks hanging over David’s and Courtney’s intentions make it even more urgent to look beyond the immediate perpetrators of the violence, Absalom and Bryce, and recognise the roles and responsibilities of others.

Conclusion

Throughout this post, I have argued that the 13 Reasons Why television series and the novel upon which it is based treat a number of themes that are important for understanding rape culture, including how the responses of others may both precipitate rape and also increase its impact and legacy for survivors. My reading of 13/Thirteen Reasons Why has illustrated the three-step sequence in Hannah’s rape story. First, Hannah is physically abandoned in the hot tub and left vulnerable to Bryce’s unwanted attentions. Secondly, Hannah is raped by Bryce. Thirdly, after the rape, Hannah has an overwhelming sense of isolation and despair. She experiences a “second abandonment” in which she feels isolated from her classmates and let down by the school counsellor, Mr Porter. It is this sense of second abandonment and not just the rape itself, which prompts her to take her life. This sequence is echoed in the three passages of 2 Samuel that relate the story of David’s ten concubines. First, they are physically abandoned when David and his household leave Jerusalem. Secondly, they are then raped by Absalom. Thirdly, when David returns to Jerusalem, he confines and abandons them again, leaving them to a life of social isolation, sequestered until death.

Reading these 2 Samuel passages in the light of Hannah’s story draws attention to the failure in David’s decision to leave his ten concubines in such a vulnerable situation, and, particularly, his inadequate and harmful response to the sexual assaults on these women. This does not in any way detract from Absalom’s guilt as perpetrator of multiple rapes, but it does suggest a wider context in which to understand the impact of sexual violence on these women. It is not only rapists who contribute to survivors’ trauma. Other people often compound and reinforce the damage by the responses that they make in the aftermath of rape. These responses frequently leave survivors feeling rejected, isolated, and abandoned, rather than supported along a path towards recovery and healing. Recognising this failing in both David and Mr Porter helps to focus attention on the different ways that survivors can experience social harm from the negative or insensitive reactions of others, even when this might not be their intention. The social response to rape can make its impact even worse for those affected. While Bryce and Absalom are fully responsible for the act of sexual violence, the negative or thoughtless reactions and failures of support by others also need to be highlighted and challenged.

Furthermore, when we read back in the other direction, from biblical text to television series and novel, we might notice that the biblical text leaves an unanswered question about what David really intended when he left the concubines behind. A similar question can be asked of the hot tub scene in the book. Viewers of the series who are unfamiliar with the novel are likely to be surprised that this question even arises. Nevertheless, the fact that the series alters how the scene plays out in the novel may be a telling indicator that the series producers sought to remove this disturbing aspect of the book. When Courtney walks away from the hot tub, leaving Hannah with Bryce (Asher 2007: 263), the possibility is raised that she is complicit (to some extent at least) in Hannah’s subsequent rape.

Thus, reading 2 Samuel through the lens of the television series 13 Reasons Why has highlighted the responses and reactions of others in the aftermath of rape, and the damage done to survivors by a “second abandonment”. Reading in the other direction, from 2 Samuel to the novel Thirteen Reasons Why, has raised a question mark over both David’s and Courtney’s intentions during their “first abandonment”. Again, while Absalom and Bryce must take full responsibility for their perpetration of rape, David and Courtney may likewise be held culpable for their (perhaps deliberate) complicity in its execution. These two seemingly very different stories can therefore be read alongside each other as part of a wider conversation on rape cultures, both past and present.

 

[i] In this chapter, I will refer to the 13 Reasons Why (2017) Netflix series as “the series” and to Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) as “the novel”. When I am referring to both simultaneously, I will use 13/Thirteen Reasons Why.

[ii] For a similar approach, where I consider sexual violence, Latin American torture reports, the death of Saul (1 Samuel 31) and the violation of Muammar Gaddafi, see David Tombs, “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse”, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53 (Autumn 1999): 89−108 and “Silent No More: Sexual Violence in Conflict as a Challenge to the Worldwide Church”, Acta Theologica 34/2 (2014): 142−60.While both these works read the biblical text from a contemporary context, neither gives sustained attention to reading back from the text to the present, as I attempt here.

[iii] In recent years, faith-based organisations have become far more active in preventing and responding to sexual and other gender-based violence. Organisations like “We Will Speak Out”, a global coalition of Christian-based Non-Governmental Organisations and church groups committed to ending sexual violence across communities around the world, are at the forefront of this work. Prevention of sexual violence is of utmost importance, but churches and faith communities can also make a crucial contribution beyond this, as they are especially well placed to address also secondary victimisation and to challenge negative attitudes and responses towards survivors. At present, however, this potential goes largely unfulfilled (see Tearfund, Silent No More: The Untapped Potential of the Worldwide Church in Addressing Sexual Violence, Teddington, Middlesex: Tearfund, 2011).

[iv] The language of 2 Samuel 16 does not explicitly state that Absalom rapes the women by force, or that they do not consent. This is hardly surprising: in the Hebrew Bible sexual violence is routinely depicted in sparse and casual terms and any indications of a woman’s right and ability to give or withhold consent are rare. Many interpreters fail to refer to the sexual act in this tradition as rape. A common circumlocution is that Absalom’s intercourse with the women of the royal harem constitutes his claim to the throne (see for instance P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. The Anchor Yale Bible: II Samuel. A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974) and/or an assertion of his male prowess (see Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Women’s Bible Commentary. Revised ed. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988, p.162). I agree that political symbolism is central to the tradition, but it remains important also to name Absalom’s actions here as rape. Even if he did not use excessive physical violence, there is nothing to suggest that the ten concubines granted consent, and there is considerable disparity of power between concubines (i.e. secondary wives) and Absalom, the king’s son. The passage presents sexual decision-making and agency entirely as male concerns (Ahithophel plans, Absalom executes and David responds to the rape). Furthermore, reading these passages in the light of the rape of Absalom’s half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13), and of Nathan’s prophecy (2 Samuel 12), offers a clear context for reading 2 Samuel 16 as a narrative of rape as well (on this, see Ken Stone, Sex, Honor and Power in the Deuteronomistic History. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).

[v] These rumours are compounded by Bryce sharing a photo of Hannah coming down a slide in the playground, taken by Justin on their date. Although the picture is entirely innocent, Justin misrepresents to his friends what is happening in the photo. Given Hannah’s pose (she is lying supine on the slide, her clothes dishevelled), they are quick to believe his version of events.

[vi] Justin and Jessica go back to the house to find a room where they can make out. A little later Stephanie leaves the hot tub to find a bathroom in the house, and Zach offers to show her the way because “it’s like a maze in there”.

[vii] Hannah’s slightly hesitant reply and Mr Porter’s interpretation of it as expressing doubt are strange given the way the rape is depicted in the series. The discrepancy is best understood as a plot device, which allows the meeting with Mr Porter in the series to remain reasonably close to the version in the novel, despite the two different depictions of the rape. In the novel, the rape is depicted as involving less explicit use of force, and at the meeting, Hannah tells Mr Porter: “You mean rape? No I don’t think so” (Asher 2007: 276), which makes his response easier to understand.

[viii] The story forms part of what is often referred to as “The Succession Narrative” (2 Samuel 9−1 Kings 2). This narrative focuses on David’s reign (including the events unfolding in his household and court), and ends by describing how his son Solomon came to succeed him as king. Absalom has already featured in 2 Samuel 13, where his sister Tamar is raped by their half-brother Amnon (all three are children of David). David’s role in this event is critical for understanding the unravelling of his relationship with Absalom. Amnon draws his father into an enabling role in the rape by asking David to instruct Tamar to go to Amnon’s house and cook for her “ailing” brother (v.7). It is when she is there that Amnon rapes her. When David learns what has happened, he becomes angry with Amnon but does not punish him (v.21). From this moment, Absalom hates Amnon (v.22). David’s inaction instigates Absalom to exact revenge and restore (his) honour. Two years later, Absalom entices Amnon to a feast where he has his servants kill him (vv.23-29). There are interesting similarities and echoes between the two violent incidents (namely, incestuous rape and fratricide). Absalom requests that David send “my brother,” which echoes Amnon’s earlier request that David send “my sister”. Both times David plays a crucial but unwitting role. After Amnon’s murder, Absalom flees Jerusalem for three years, until David eventually allows him to return. A further two years pass, however, before David agrees to a reunion with his recalcitrant son (14:28-33).

[ix] 2 Samuel 15 opens with Absalom endearing himself to the people of Israel, thereby building up his power base in Jerusalem (vv.1-6). After four years, he travels to Hebron in order to extend his support further. When he summons David’s respected counsellor Ahithophel to join him in Hebron, it signals that a tipping point has been reached, and a revolt against David is imminent (v.12). The opportunity to take the crown may have been Absalom’s primary concern, yet the story also suggests that he nurtures a keen hatred, caused by both Amnon’s violent actions against Tamar and his (passive and enabling) father’s inaction. Revenge to redress perceived dishonour is likely to be another major concern for Absalom.

[x] David first marries Michal, daughter of Saul; he then marries six further named wives during his time in Hebron (Ahinoam, Abigail, Maachah, Haggith, Abital and Eglah). 2 Samuel 5:13 says that in Jerusalem “David took more wives and concubines”. This includes his marriage to Bathsheba, after arranging the death of her husband Uriah.

[xi] The literature on the public rapes that took place during the war in Bosnia make for a terrible reminder that such was not just an archaic practice (e.g. Inger Skjelsbæk, The Political Psychology of War Rape: Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, War, Politics and Experience, Oxford: Routledge, 2012). On rape in war and the Bible, see Pamela Gordon and Harold Washington, “Rape as a Military Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible”, in A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, edited by Athalya Brenner, 308−25, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. The fullest study on rape and the Hebrew Bible to date remains Susanne Scholz, Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010.

[xii] There are probable allusions here to the Bathsheba story, including to David seeing Bathsheba from his roof (2 Samuel 11:2). The prophet Nathan denounces David for taking Bathsheba and killing Uriah, and warns of God’s punishment (2 Samuel 12:11–12). This passage offers the particularly troubling suggestion that rapes are part of a divine plan to punish David. In addition, Ahithophel appears to be Bathsheba’s grandfather, and may therefore have been motivated by avenging his own family honour (2 Samuel 11:3 and 23:34).

[xiii] On adultery as a source of male dishonour, see Carolyn Pressler, The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993.

[xiv] Commentators regularly glide over any criticism of David’s action, and some ignore 20:3 entirely. Arnold Anderson (2 Samuel, Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Word Books, 1989, p.240) does not offer any comment on v.3: his discussion jumps from v.2 straight to v.4. McCarter merely acknowledges but does not question or challenge the action: “Now that these women have been illegally claimed by Abshalom (16:21–22), they must be put away” (1974: 423). Graeme Auld presents David’s action as benign, and discusses mostly whether or not there is any allusion between the ten women and the ten tribes (I and II Samuel: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011, pp.561–62).

[xv] For examinations of this situation from very different contexts, see Lee Madigan and Nancy Gamble’s work on responses to rape in the United States, The Second Rape: Society’s Continued Betrayal of the Victim, New York: Lexington Books, 1989. On rape in conflict, and the stigma associated with survivors, see Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, A Patient Heart: Stigma Acceptance and Rejection around Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Working Paper. Washington DC: World Bank, 2011; and Tearfund’s To Make our Voices Heard: Listening to survivors of sexual violence in Central African Republic, Teddington, Middlesex: Tearfund, 2015.

[xvi] For a theological perspective see also Anna T. Höglund, “Justice for Women in War? Feminist Ethics and Human Rights for Women.” Feminist Theology 11 (2003): 346–61.

[xvii] Examples include the use of “comfort women” by Japanese troops during the Second World War (see the post by Samantha Joo on this blog!), the trafficking of women in Bosnia in the 1990s, and recent stories of sexual slavery by Boko Haram and Islamic State.

[xviii] There is some support for this from Hannah herself, who says at the start of the cassette: “No, this tape is not about Courtney … though she does play a part. But Courtney has no idea what I’m about to say because she left just as things got going” (Asher 2007: 259).

[xix] Even before the previous week’s party at Jessica’s house, Hannah had seen Bryce’s true character. On Cassette 3 Side B, Bryce and a girlfriend come to the cinema where Hannah and Clay work. About halfway through the film, they see the girl run out, clearly distressed (Asher 2007: 146). After the film, Bryce stays to talk to Hannah. Clay warns Hannah against Bryce, and Hannah replies, “I know who he is Clay. I know what he is like. Believe me” (Asher 2007: 147). Even more importantly, at Jessica’s party the previous week, Hannah witnesses Bryce rape Jessica, but does not intervene. (This is another rape story that requires fuller investigation and discussion elsewhere.) In the novel, Hannah describes this on Cassette 5 Side B (Asher 2007: 220-31), which is included in Episode 9 of the series (Cassette 5 Side A). Hannah’s previous experience with Courtney also gives her good reason to be distrustful. On Cassette 3 Side A, Hannah warns that Courtney’s sweet persona is misleading: “And you … are … just … so sweet. Right? Wrong” (Asher 2007: 94). She goes on to explain how Courtney used her to get a lift to a party, only for Hannah to discover that Courtney was spreading rumours about her (Asher 2007: 113).

[xx] Courtney’s awareness of the threat of male predatory behaviour has already been confirmed earlier, when, at another party, she warns Hannah against spending time with a guy who gives Hannah a drink and then invites her to stay and talk to him (Asher 2007: 103). Moreover, Hannah is likewise familiar with Bryce’s predatory reputation among fellow students when she notes on the cassette, “Everyone knows who you are, Bryce. Everyone knows what you do” (Asher 2007: 263). Clay, too, seems familiar with Bryce’s reputation: when he hears Hannah say on the cassette that Bryce calls her name in the hot tub, he exclaims “God no. This can only end one way” (Asher 2007: 260).

[xxi] In some ways, such a charitable reading of Courtney’s character would fit with Hannah’s perspective in the book: that her (Hannah’s) problems often stem from people genuinely not understanding how their behaviour impacts her. There is, however, enough evidence in the book to suggest that Courtney’s decision to abandon Hannah with Bryce in the hot tub may have been more menacing than Hannah realises.

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The Bible is Full of Horrors – That’s Why it Should be Required Reading for Today’s Children

Melvyn Bragg branded the decline of the King James Bible in the UK “a disgrace”. The writer and broadcaster suggested that it should be reintroduced into schools and read on a monthly basis.

Speaking at the Henley Literary Festival, Bragg was clearly exercised by the “great deprivation” young people experience through their lack of exposure to the Bible. He derided those who say the biblical text is “too complicated”, calling them “wimps” and “terrible people”.

In a response to Bragg’s comments, the journalist Andrew Brown asked in the Guardian whether the King James Bible was too graphic for children to read, wondering “how could you possibly teach it in school?”

But perhaps close, critical reading of biblical texts in the classroom might begin to address the arguably more pressing deprivation of Britain’s young people. This is less about the “depth of language” of particular biblical translations and more about the absence of recognition and respect for young people’s own experiences of violence.

Ignoring that the Bible records horrible, terrifying human events makes it easier to gloss over the fact that these same things occur regularly today. Sexual assault, genocide and slavery, all described in the Bible, are still rife. If we want to confront today’s horrors, it helps to also confront biblical accounts that terrify us.

Students should be given the tools to address these issues to truly prepare them for the real world (and not just the workplace).

Facing Terror

Texts, including the Bible, do not have meaning on their own. Readers must interpret the words on the page, and give the Bible meaning, whether that meaning reflects the ancient context in which it was written, or some meaning for contemporary life. We as readers decide what we do with what we read, and whether we gloss over violence and oppression – or confront it.

Brown suggests that “teachers might struggle with the visceral violence” of the King James Bible but critiques contemporary biblical translations for casting “a veil of ordinariness over the stark horror of many of the stories”. But then violence is horrifyingly ordinary. The scale of sexual abuse scandals in the UK and the prevalence of bullying in schools should tell us that many children are all too familiar with the mundanity of violence. Children are more likely to be victims of, and witnesses to, violence than adults. Sanitising horrific biblical stories, or focusing on the beauty of the language in the King James Bible translation rather than asking hard, critical questions of the biblical text, won’t make real-life violence disappear.

After all, it’s not as if we don’t already teach -— and celebrate —- horrific biblical episodes. Babies and infants are given books and toys based on Noah’s Ark – a biblical story of genocide. And schools and churches don’t flinch at showcasing images of extreme torture through the crucifixion of Christ. The horrific crucifixion of Jesus is often glossed over but torture, the death penalty, and false imprisonment are still present in society.

Perhaps Bragg might be underestimating young people in his assertion that they find the Bible “complicated” and Brown might be patronising students by questioning whether horrific biblical texts should be taught in schools.

Everyday Violence

The key is not to downplay the horror of God being compared to a slave-owner who beats his slaves into shreds, or that scripture seems fine with threatening sexual assault as punishment for disobedience, or that the annihilation of huge groups of people can be justified with religion.

Instead, the key is to use these texts as tools to confront violence in society. This starts in the classroom, reading through difficult texts with students and allowing them to grapple with issues of injustice. As Brian Blount, among others, has pointed out, avoiding violent texts as frightening or irrelevant to today’s “peaceful” society ignores the many communities for whom society is not at all peaceful. By the time students get to university many of them have already had personal experiences with violence; shying away from those topics only marginalises them further.

There are tools for teaching troubling texts in the classroom, as teachers well know when exploring difficult social issues, modern history, and contemporary literature, none of which shy away from addressing violence. And there are many, many, many scholars teaching Bible at university who are already helping students to read these difficult texts carefully and critically.

The ConversationEspecially when biblical texts have been used (unjustly or not) to justify some horrific practices and policies, from slavery to colonialism to genocide, we cannot afford to ignore the Bible. The solution is not to avoid difficult subject matter, but to give students of all ages the tools to work through them. Students will then have the ability to confront injustice when they see it now.

K B Edwards, Director SIIBS, University of Sheffield and M J C Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Rape Culture Discourse and Female Impurity: Genesis 34 as a Case Study

Jessica M. Keady graduated from the University of Manchester and is Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. Jessica has worked extensively on ancient texts with special focus on sexuality and gender. Her monograph Vulnerability and Valour: A Gendered Analysis of Everyday Life in the Dead Sea Scrolls Communities has recently been published (Library of Second Temple Studies 91, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). While teaching at the University of Chester (before jetting off to Helsinki to take up a prestigious postgraduate research fellowship – and then promptly getting her current post!) Jessica was also actively involved in the Sexualities and Anglican Identities Project. You can follow Jessica on @JessicaMKeady.

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Biblical rape texts like Genesis 34, the story of the rape of Dinah, can serve as a lens through which we can examine and critique ancient ideations of gender violence and purity. They also allow us to trace the ways these ideations continue to shape and inform contemporary understandings of rape. This can encourage readers and interpreters to perform an act of “political resistance” to biblical ideologies that sustain contemporary rape and purity cultures (particularly those pertaining to female sexuality and purity), and to assess the possible significance that such ideologies have for readers of the Bible today. As Sandie Gravett explains, recognizing rape in biblical texts “opens up the text beyond the bounds set thousands of years ago and invites translators to be more than passive recipients of ancient words and to do more than simply reinscribe the cultural norms of these past societies onto the modern stage” (2004: 298−9).

 

Defining Rape Culture and Purity Culture

Rape culture is a term used to describe the sociocultural normalization of sexual violence and its links to broader patterns of misogyny and sexism. Such normalization is woven through our global, civil, social, and cultural discourses: hence, rape-supportive hashtags trend on Twitter, rape “jokes” are a regular feature on TV shows and radio programmes, judges hand out lenient sentences to convicted rapists due to the perpetrators’ age, sporting or academic ability, or lack of criminal history, and rape complainants are commonly blamed for their own assaults because of their dress, alcohol intake, and sexual history. It is within this rape culture framework that religious texts, such as Genesis 34 are read, preached, and interpreted.

Moreover, rape cultures also give expression to various discourses around issues of purity, which again shape the contexts in which religious traditions are read. Purity (or modesty) culture is an intrinsic part of rape culture, which blames rape survivors, particularly female survivors, for their own violation. The dominant discourse of purity culture demands that women should remain sexually (and thus spiritually) “pure”, and that sexual activity outside of marriage renders a woman sexually and morally “defiled”—“used goods” with compromised economic and social value.

Additionally, purity culture discourses insist that it is the woman’s responsibility to “preserve” and “guard” her purity, by protecting her bodily boundaries from encroachments. Consequently, it is not uncommon for an applicant seeking political asylum to omit mention of experiences of sexual violence, especially if his or her religious tradition considers extra-marital sex a sin. Whether sex was entered into with consent or not, it is perceived as defiling. Therefore, to acknowledge rape is to acknowledge sinfulness and impurity, bringing shame upon rape survivors and, not infrequently, their families also (Einhorn and Berthold 2011: 41). Another way that rape culture and purity culture may exert impact on people’s experiences of sexual violence is in relation to survivors’ willingness to seek justice through the legal system. In the United Kingdom, an estimated nine out of ten rapes go unreported and only 6% of reported rapes end in a conviction. The reasons for under-reporting and low conviction rates are multiple and complex but the pernicious influences of rape culture play a part (Lees-Massey, Morris, and Tanner 2016).

This raises the question of how purity and rape cultures, particularly the issues of victim blaming and shaming, play a part here. Focusing particularly on female rape survivors, E. J. Graff argues that understanding rape as primarily a sexual violation places the burden on women to protect their bodies’ purity. Subsequently, public perceptions of sexual assault typically focus on the woman and her actions (was she drunk? What was she wearing? Did she flirt with her “attacker”? Was she “asking for it”?). Diversion is also evident in the case of Brock Turner, who, in his statement to Judge Aaron Persky placed the blame for his act of sexual assault on a student “party culture” of excessive drinking. That in turn allowed Turner’s defence lawyers to argue that the complainant was so intoxicated by alcohol that she could not know whether Turner had assaulted her without her consent (Fantz 2016; Grecian 2016). By implication, it was her failure adequately to guard her own sexual boundaries (and thus to preserve her “purity”) that rendered her culpable for her own violation. Gender violence, and the rape culture discourses that sustain it, are thus built upon unequal gendered power relations, which are themselves supported by patriarchy (Kilmartin 2007: 5). These relations create and sustain the rhetoric of rape cultures so ingrained within our world—a world where gender violence is normalized and survivors are routinely blamed for their own assaults, deterring them, frequently, from seeking support and justice.

 

Rape and Silence: The Portrayal of Dinah in Genesis 34

My reading of biblical rape narratives in the light of contemporary rape culture, intentionally juxtaposes ancient and contemporary understandings of sexual violence in order to better understand and respond to such violence. Although there are no biblical Hebrew words for “rape” or “rape culture”—as we understand these terms today—this does not mean that sexual violence is absent from the biblical text. On the contrary, many of the features contemporary commentators identify as central to rape culture—including discourses around female sexuality, male dominance, defilement, and purity—do appear in the Hebrew Bible.

In Genesis 34, Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, is raped by Shechem. After the violent sexual encounter (v. 2), Shechem is so overcome with “love” for Dinah (v. 3) that he asks his father, Hamor the Hivite, to assist him in his plan to marry her (v. 4). When Jacob hears of his daughter’s defilement (tm’) he remains passive (v. 5), while his sons react strongly (they are “indignant and very angry”, v. 7). When Shechem and Hamor negotiate the marriage with Jacob (vv. 8-12), Dinah’s brothers demand that, before there can be any intermarriage between the Jacobite and Shechemite peoples, all Shechemite males must be circumcised (vv. 14-17). And, while the male Shechemites lie in pain after their mass circumcision, Dinah’s brothers attack the city and kill them all, including Shechem and Hamor. They then take back Dinah (who has presumably been kept captive by Shechem following her rape) and abduct the Shechemite women and children (vv. 25-9). When Jacob hears about these actions he condemns his sons (v. 30). In response, they ask if their sister should be treated “like a whore” and it is with this question that the narrative ends (v. 31). Dinah herself, meanwhile, remains silent throughout the entire narrative. We receive no insight into her perspective.

There has been, and continues to be, disagreement as to whether Dinah is raped in this biblical narrative, which is how I interpret and have summarized it above. Scholars have suggested a range of possibilities with regard to relations between Dinah and Shechem, from rape (e.g. Blyth 2010; Klopper 2010; Scholz 2000; Shemesh 2007), statutory rape (Frymer-Kensky 1998), and abduction marriage (Hankore 2013), to seduction (Bechtel 1994; Douglas 1993) and even romantic love (Fox 1983). Others conclude that the text is inconclusive (van Wolde 2002). I am persuaded that the text depicts Dinah’s rape. The strongest evidence in favour of this reading is, in my mind, the biblical Hebrew usage and ordering of the three verbs (lq, škb, and ‘nh) used to describe Shechem’s actions towards Dinah (v. 2). These verbs unequivocally denote gendered violence in other biblical narratives, most significantly in the accounts of the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13:14) and the gang rape of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19:25; cf. 20:5).

 

Dinah’s Defilement in Biblical Scholarship

In Genesis 34:5 we witness Jacob’s (lack of) reaction to his daughter’s sexual violation: “Now Jacob heard that Shechem had defiled (timmē’) his daughter Dinah; but his sons were with his cattle in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they came.” There are only three references to someone being “defiled” in Genesis and each appears in this chapter to describe the impact of Shechem’s sexual violation of Dinah (vv. 5, 13, 27). The Hebrew verb timmē’ is key to understanding the remainder of the narrative and, after its first appearance in v. 5, is used twice more by Dinah’s brothers with reference to vindication of her “defilement” (vv. 13, 27). On each of the three occasions it is used, timmē’ appears in the piel (that is, a Hebrew verb form that often expresses intensity), which translates as “to make impure, make unclean, defile, or desecrate” (Clines 2009: 141). Significantly, in Genesis 34, it is Dinah (and not Shechem) who is labelled as ritually unacceptable after her sexual assault.

For some scholars, however, Dinah’s defilement is less the result of her rape than a consequence of Shechem “taking” her virginity before she is properly given to him in marriage (e.g. Feinstein 2014: 67). Although Dinah’s sexual status is not discussed in Genesis 34, we might presume that she is unmarried, and, therefore, likely to be a virgin. This is also hinted at in the Septuagint translation of this narrative, which describes Dinah as a parthenos (a term that can be translated “virgin”). (For Graff, it is characteristic of rape cultures that women are expected to remain virgins until marriage, because women’s bodies are depicted primarily as vessels for procreation or male pleasure—and women must therefore strive to maintain their sexual purity.) Certainly, in the biblical traditions, a woman’s social “value” is typically measured according to her sexual chastity and purity; an unmarried non-virgin could not expect to garner her father a generous bride price, as her socio-sexual currency would be diminished.

Read within this framework of sexual violence and (dis)honour, Dinah’s rape is transformed from a violent assault on her personal integrity (as rape tends to be understood in modern western contexts) into a means of dishonouring and humiliating her male kin. This is due to the wider honour-shame context and because Shechem is understood to have exposed the Jacobite men’s incapacity to protect “their” women. Shechem’s misappropriation of Dinah’s sexuality (particularly his “theft” of her virginity) can thus be understood as an act that brings shame on her father Jacob, and on her brothers. The emphasis then, is on men and male honour, not on Dinah or the personal, devastating effect on her integrity or dignity.

Male violence continues to be in focus in Genesis 34:25-30. As they had planned, Simeon and Levi kill all the Shechemite males in the city and take the women and children as war spoil. After killing Hamor and Shechem with the sword, the brothers “took Dinah” (v. 26) out of Shechem’s house and went away. The use and echo of the verb lq (“to take”) in verses 2 and 26 is significant, as the reader can trace the aggression inherent within the narrative from these two pivotal moments: Dinah is first “taken” (that is “raped”) by Shechem and later “taken back” by her brothers, as part of their violent revenge. Her silence in this narrative is absolute. What she herself thinks and feels about the events surrounding her “takings” is left unspoken. Had she been given the opportunity to address or to write a letter to Shechem, what would she have said? How would she have described the impact of rape and abduction? But like with so many survivors of sexual violence, Dinah’s voice—her narrative—is silenced. (NB: Some feminist artists have sought to redress this silencing. Hence, Anita Diamant has written a popular novel, which retells some of the stories of Genesis from Dinah’s first-person perspective. Notably, Diamant’s story as told in The Red Tent, does not depict Dinah’s relations with Shechem as violent.)

 

Conclusions

Recognizing rape in biblical narratives opens up the text and its literary figures and allows contemporary readers, teachers, and educators to question and query the social and gendered roles of these ancient societies in relation to our own. In a modern context, the narrative of Dinah in Genesis 34 touches on larger issues surrounding rape, female sexuality, purity, and the status of women. These issues need to be exposed, written about, taught, and understood within a framework that seeks actively to resist victim blaming and shaming, and to take into consideration the rape and purity cultures which pervade so many of our own cultural contexts. Reading Genesis 34 with this in mind demonstrates that biblical texts echo and perpetuate the damaging discourses prevalent within contemporary rape and purity cultures. This biblical narrative testifies to the silencing of a rape survivor, to the exoneration of violence, the dismissal of rape as “just sex”, and to the insistence that survivors are somehow “damaged” or “defiled” by rape.

As readers living in rape and purity cultures, we surely have a responsibility to contest these discourses, both in the biblical text and in our own cultural locations. If scholars, clergy, and educators simply refer to biblical rape narratives, such as Genesis 34, as love stories, filled with passion, romance and seduction, or accept unquestioningly the text’s own insistence that Dinah is “defiled” by her rape, then they risk perpetuating the harmful rhetoric that underpins many rape and purity cultures throughout the world today.

 

Works Cited

Bechtel, Lyn. 1994. “What if Dinah is Not Raped? (Genesis 34).” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 19 (62): 19–36.

Blyth, Caroline. 2008. “Redeemed by His Love? The Characterization of Shechem in Genesis 34.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33 (1): 3–18.

Blyth, Caroline. 2010. The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34: Interpreting Dinah’s Silence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clines, David. 2009. Concise Dictionary of Classical Biblical Hebrew. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press.

Douglas, Mary. 1993. In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Einhorn, Bruce, and S. Megan Berthold. 2011. “Reconstructing Babel: Bridging Cultural Dissonance between Asylum Seekers and Adjudicators.” In Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrence and Galya Ruffer, 27–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feinstein, Eve Levavi. 2014. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fox, Everett. In the Beginning: A New English Rendition of the Book of Genesis. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. 1998. “Virginity in the Bible.” In Gender and Laws in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by Victor Matthews, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, and Bernard M. Levinson, 86–91. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Gravett, Sandie. 2004. “Reading “Rape” in the Hebrew Bible: A Consideration of Language.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28: 279–99.

Hankore, Daniel. 2013. The Abduction of Dinah. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

Kilmartin, Christopher. 2007. Men’s Violence Against Women: Theory, Research and Activism. London: Routledge.

Klopper, Francis. 2010. “Rape and the Case of Dinah: Ethical Responsibilities for Reading Genesis 34.” Old Testament Essay 23 (3): 652–65.

Lees-Massey, Caitlin, Jessica Morris, and Dean Tanner. 2016. “A Complaint of Rape.” 24 Hours in Police Custody. Television Programme. London: Channel 4.

Scholz, Susanne. 2000. Rape Plots: A Feminist Cultural Study of Genesis 34. Studies in Biblical Literature 13. New York: Peter Lang.

Shemesh, Yael. 2007. “Rape is Rape is Rape: The Story of Dinah and Shechem.” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 119 (1): 2–21.

Wolde, Ellen van. (2002). ‘The Dinah Story: Rape or Worse?’ Old Testament Essays, 15/1: 225-39.

 

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Rape Culture Denial – A Response

[A shorter version of this piece was published subsequently: see, Johanna Stiebert, ‘Denying Rape Culture: A Response to Luke Gittos’. Women’s Studies Journal 32 1/2 (Dec 2018: 63-72). Available online: https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=FL38001280]

Introduction

When I search on Amazon Books for publications on rape culture, the first item to pop up is Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth: From Steubenville to Ched Evans by Luke Gittos (SOCIETAS Essays in Political & Cultural Criticism, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2015). The book cover’s blurb describes Gittos as a solicitor with ‘extensive experience in defending allegations of rape and sexual violence’. He is also the legal editor for Spiked (or Sp!ked), a UK internet magazine with a libertarian outlook[1] and he has chaired a panel discussion debating rape culture: ‘Rape Culture: Menace or Myth?’ held on 18 October 2015, as part of the series ‘Feminism and Its Discontents’, The Battle of Ideas.

The book title makes me uncomfortable. This is not a book about dangerous myths featuring rape, such as the myths that turn violent abduction and forced sex into something glamorous or titillating: the myths of Greek gods abducting and impregnating women, or of Roman men seizing Sabine women, or of Benjaminite men seizing the women of Shiloh. The subtext of all of these myths is that it is something of an honour, or something exciting, to attract the attention of a deity or man who simply cannot restrain his desire, his ‘need’ for sex and reproduction. Artworks of the rape of the Sabine women in particular often dwell voyeuristically on the muscled bodies of the captors and the beautiful curves tantalizingly visible under the dislodged robes of the captive women.  These myths are seductive – they turn rape into romance and sexual allure – which surely is disturbing in that a violent act is beautified, justified.

I guessed from the title of Gittos’ book already that I was unlikely to agree with the core thesis: namely, that rape culture is not real, or, if it exists at all, that it is a considerably exaggerated, sensationalized phenomenon designed to propel a toxic ideology. Gittos’ application of the word ‘myth’ clearly does not pertain to mythology: its usage is idiomatic and pertains to falsehood.

Rape culture – briefly – is the concept that in a given setting – and I include my own cultural context of the contemporary UK – rape and other expressions of sexualized violence occur with some frequency. This can be explained in part due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality (e.g. sexual objectification, trivializing of rape, downplaying of sexual violence, victim blaming). One expression of and vehicle for such attitudes is popular culture (including images in music videos or advertising).

It was clear to me right away that Gittos and I were not aligned in our views – but why only read literature with which I agree? In my profession, teaching at a University, I make a great deal about how variously a text or topic can be interpreted. I expect my students to read widely and to learn to position themselves and argue their case after reviewing a range of arguments. I encourage debate and listening to different points of view. I tell my students that it matters less whether I agree with them than that they can articulate, argue and justify a coherent case. Sometimes, I have changed my mind on reading a well-argued case I had not considered before. Sometimes, my own point of view has become more sharpened and crystallized through encounter with a different point of view. Plus, Amazon reviews praise Gittos’ book for bringing a ‘cool head and the light of reason… [to] a heated topic’, as well as for being ‘clear and well argued’, ‘calm, level-headed and sympathetic’ and for confronting ‘fashionable orthodoxies’ and ‘the tyranny of political correctness’. Rape and many of the images I see all around me that glamourize and commercialize sexual violence make me feel anything but calm and level-headed – but, why not read a book that takes me right out of the sphere of my colleagues and friends who tend, broadly, to agree with my politics and my values?

I have read Gittos’ book and yes, I disagree with his argument. I do not find his argumentation either consistently rigorous or consistently level-headed – not least because he ‘stacks the deck’ with his (rather inflammatory) refrain that those who affirm rape culture are all panicked, feverish hysterics, manipulated by a fear-mongering surveillance state and sucked in by widely disseminated but completely wrong statistics, while he is reasonable and has access to sober facts. The experiences of others (be it rape victims, or professionals who work with rape victims) constitute ‘endless details’ and are not considered because they are anecdotal and emotive – but the input of lawyers Gittos knows, or of his friend, or his editor (all unnamed and all hearsay), receive mention in support of Gittos’ claims, in the absence of any independent research or any statistics. One important thing I do take away from the experience of reading Gittos’ book is the importance of defining one’s territory. Hence, just as other designations alongside ‘rape culture’ that are descriptive of complex ideas – such as, ‘education’, ‘left-wing’, ‘racism’, ‘pornography’, ‘feminism’ – have meaning on their own and can serve as a short-hand, they each also benefit from and sometimes urgently require delineation and qualification.

What follows is my summary and response to Gittos’ book, which I consider a toxic tirade thin on either responsible research or analysis.

Rape culture skepticism and denial: the wider context

While I will mostly restrict myself to Gittos’ book, his is not a lone voice. There are other prominent rape culture skeptics or deniers, too – for instance, Wendy McElroy, who has self-published Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women (2016), as well as Camille Paglia, Christina Marie Hoff Sommers and others. Their voices are not uniform in every respect. Hence, whereas McElroy and Hoff Sommers claim a feminist high ground (they are real feminists), Paglia has declared feminism defunct and dead. Paglia is also altogether less willing to engage with the concept of rape culture, dismissing it – certainly, in the context of North America, though not India – as ‘ridiculous’. Tendencies that unify the rape culture skeptics and deniers referred to here are an emphasis on individualism and libertarianism alongside a (so-called) sex-positive/anti-censorship of pornography perspective and a need to stress that they are not anti-men and that men are victims, too (of both rape and wrongful or unreasonable rape allegations).

Denial of rape culture appears to be part of a distinctive worldview and I acknowledge that I do not share in it. I am not libertarian – although I may agree with some platforms of some libertarians (e.g. concerning opposition to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq). I do not deny individual accountability but I probably place greater weight than the rape culture deniers on the contribution of systemic-level influences and injustices. I, too, am opposed to certain forms of censorship and would also, like them, oppose the prohibition of polemical speakers on campuses. I believe universities should be places of free speech and spaces to present as well as resist and protest disparate views. When it comes to pornography, however, I am more circumspect than they, because I factor in what I see as the damage wrought by the sex industry on people’s lives, including on psycho-sexual development. I am also concerned about availability of pornography to children and other vulnerable people. Hence, I approve of some censorship on pornography, while acknowledging that the topic is complex (not only in terms of what constitutes pornography but also in terms of where and how it should be censored, as well as whether this will be effective in terms of managing damage). I have not felt a need to state that I am not anti-men or that men, too, are victims of rape and other forms of violence and abuse – I take this as a given and consider inequality on the grounds of gender contrary to the aims of equality (and hence, of feminism).

Let me briefly digress regarding so-called ‘sex-positive feminism’, a movement advocating that sexual freedom is an essential part of women’s freedom: this movement came into being in the 1980s as a result of a split on the topic of pornography within the feminist movement. Sex-positive feminists advocate against censorship or banning of pornography, while other feminists regard pornography as central to women’s oppression, objectification and exploitation. The debate is a many-layered one and feminist views on the matter cover something of a spectrum. In my view, the word ‘sex-positive’ – rather like ‘pro-life’ in the also divisive and emotive abortion debate – is misleading. It is perfectly possible to be positive about and to enjoy sex without using or promoting or tolerating pornography – just as being pro-choice on the matter of abortion does not equate with being anti-life. The spectrum and polyphony within feminism is sometimes unacknowledged by McElroy, among others: hence, for her there are ‘real feminists’, like herself, Paglia and others (2016: 7) and then there are man-hating ‘PC feminists’ – but no further nuancing. While she might (I don’t know) write me off as ‘fluffy’ or ‘liberal’ I see no space for my feminism in her bipartite depiction.

McElroy argues that ‘rape culture is a wildly successful fiction created by PC feminists’ that ‘engender[s] a climate of fear’ (2016: 2) and is particularly rampant on university campuses (2016: 1). The agenda of these feminists who ‘occupy positions of elitism and power’ (2016: 3) is ‘nothing less than the deconstruction of the institutions, culture and values of Western society’ (2016: 2) through ‘legally [disadvantaging] one class of people (white males) in order to benefit others’ (2016: 7). McElroy accuses these PC feminists of ‘[branding] half the human race – males, and especially white males – as rapists or rape facilitators… [a] slander [that] would be denounced as hate speech if it were directed at any other class of human being, such as blacks, gays or women’ (2016: 20).

McElroy argues that if prison and military populations are taken into account, then male-male rape may be even higher than male-female rape (2016: 12). She accuses PC feminists of ignoring male-male rape and even of ‘display[ing] an explicit enjoyment of male pain, perhaps because they view it as some sort of payback’ (2016: 13). This characterization of (un-real) feminists as sadistically anti-men and the dismissal of all they stand for as ‘PC’ or as ‘ideology that… wages war upon true diversity’ (2016: 7) strikes me as a vicious caricature. After rebuking ‘PC feminists’ for ignoring or relishing in male-male rape, she herself proceeds not to address the topic further. Her reason is that while she regrets this ‘omission’, an exposition of male-male rape would itself demand a book of its own. I agree with McElroy insofar that male-male rape is highly likely to be ‘one of the most underreported and widely dismissed crimes in society’ and also, that to do the topic justice would require careful and particular ‘direction of research and analysis’ (2016: 13). I forcefully reject McElroy’s reasoning why feminists who affirm rape culture steer towards discussions of primarily or solely male-female rape (i.e. because they dismiss, even delight in male shame and pain).[2] I would say, too, that male-female rape is also highly likely to be underreported and in all probability considerably exceeds male-male rape. Of Rape Crisis UK service users in the past year, for instance, 93% were female. Reliable rape statistics are difficult to obtain but such is also the indication of data compiled by the Office for National Statistics (on this, see below).

Even more explicitly so than Gittos, McElroy is a neo-liberal, as well as someone who calls herself a ‘real’ feminist[3]– while attacking above all (un-real?) feminists for perpetuating falsehood and hysteria about rape. Among descriptors applied to McElroy by herself and her supporters are ‘individualist anarchist’, ‘libertarian feminist’, ‘equity feminist’ and ‘sex-positive feminist’. Unsurprisingly, she expresses preference for capitalism as the most productive, fair and sensible economic system and advocates for ‘privatizing higher education to provide the competition that offers freedom, and removing the power of the federal purse in academia’ (2016: 11). (We disagree on far more than just rape culture!)

Luke Gittos on Rape Culture

Gittos’ argument is that the phenomenon of rape culture derives from ‘the hysterical climate that has arisen around rape’ (2015: 3), which is fed by ‘panicked news stories’ (2015: 2). This has led, he argues, to the erroneous belief that sexually aggressive behaviour has become normalized, thereby making actual rape and sexual violence more likely. But this is actually ‘nonsense’ (2015: 9) and either ‘demonstrably false or based on extremely questionable evidence’ (2015: 7). Instead, so Gittos, rape is roundly condemned and taken very seriously (certainly in the contemporary UK), including in court, and is not endemic, or even very common. Rape culture has nothing to do with rape but is designed to facilitate the ‘fervent intervention by the state in our private and intimate lives’ (2015: 9). Because of such intervention more incidents that are not actually rape are called rape, intimacy is increasingly patrolled, and the anxiety this generates fans assertions of rape culture further.

Gittos claims that rape culture proponents ‘rely heavily on personal accounts of those involved in rape cases’ (2015: 12) but he intends ‘boldly’ not to ‘recite endless details about people’s experiences’ but to present ‘the facts’ (2015: 13). (It is unclear why the accounts of persons who have been raped or who work with rape victims or rape perpetrators are not ever a suitable source of facts.) Over and over again, we have a juxtaposition of panicked, hysterical, feverish rape culture proponents, gushing out ‘endless details about people’s experiences’, which is counterpointed with Gittos’ ‘facts’ and ‘objective substance’ (2015: 13, 14).[4] While Gittos eschews what might be called anecdotal evidence about the prevalence of rape or sexual violence, his book is none the less speckled with anecdotes that serve his purposes. There are no stories of the many revelations about rape committed by celebrities (as investigated by Operation Yewtree), or by persons in position of authority (such as football coaches, clergy) or about the numerous and long-ignored, even suppressed, cases of on-street grooming (in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, and elsewhere) – with the implication being that such would be emotive, hysterical, feverish and get in the way of judgment, objectivity and facts. Gittos refers to Operation Yewtree only insofar that it is driven ‘by the public’s reinterpretation of the past in line with the supposedly objective standards that we hold today’ (2015: 56). In other words, he casts doubt over all the allegations of sexual abuse raised by Yewtree. Again, Gittos decides what is ‘objective’ or legitimate evidence and what is not.

But, curiously, some experiences and some stories do pass muster – when they suit Gittos’ agenda. The book opens, for instance, with a press story about a sixteen-year-old referred to as ‘M’, who has pleaded guilty to rape, will have a rape conviction and be registered as a sex offender. Although what is relayed by Gittos is sparse (probably because the media coverage was similarly terse), he is quick to designate this a grave injustice against a child (moreover, a child with mental illness and low IQ) who was probably only experimenting sexually. How Gittos can conclude that this was in all likelihood a case of harmless sexual experimentation – any more than he can decide that Yewtree cases are all distorted reinventions of the past – is unfathomable. But for Gittos what was done to M is an ‘outrageous miscarriage of justice’ against ‘the most vulnerable’ (2015: 2). Given how little is reported it is difficult to decide whether he is right about this or not. In my view, however, it is a grave omission to make no mention at all of the very considerable number of unequivocal rape cases – including, as in his example, of children – cases where sexual experimentation is decidedly not an issue and where the most vulnerable were not always served well by the justice system (e.g. in the Rotherham grooming scandal. There is no attempt here at balance.

Gittos is clear about focusing primarily not on either rape or victims of rape but on ‘rape culture’ (which he places in inverted commas to suggest the spuriousness of what the term represents). Rape culture, he claims, ‘bears little resemblance to the reality of rape’ (2015: 16) – about which he, however, has nothing to say. Gittos is not a rape apologist: he is careful to point out that rape constitutes a ‘hideous criminal offence’ (2015: 15)[5] and he argues that ‘the law has expanded significantly around rape’ (2015: 14; cf. 2015: 19) – in his view too much, so that its ‘regulation of sexual etiquette’ (2015: 14) has come increasingly to interfere in intimate life.

Chapter One of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth

In the first chapter, Gittos tackles rape statistics. It is widely acknowledged by persons on various parts of the spectrum of the debate on rape prevalence and incidence, that reliable statistics are very difficult to obtain.[6] It is, quite simply, not possible to interview everyone, or to ensure that everyone interviewed reports truthfully. Moreover, the definition of rape and – even more so – of sexual violence is somewhat variable. The Crime Survey for England and Wales and the data of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) states that an estimated 85,000 women and 12,000 men per year are raped or severely sexually assaulted.

The number of 85,000,[7] Gittos agrees, before dispelling its accuracy, is high. He also designates the number a ‘fixation’ for rape culture advocates (2015: 27, 36)[8] and proposes that it is grossly inflated. He does not discuss the counter-suggestion that the figure may indeed legitimately be high – might even be conservative. Hence, Rape Crisis UK, for instance, reports an annual total of 202,666 calls to its helpline and has assisted 67,059 individuals with specialist services in the past year. Gittos focuses instead on the survey questions and points out that ‘someone who is penetrated without consent is not necessarily a “victim” of rape or serious sexual assault, even in law’ because this ‘fails to take into account an alleged perpetrator’s knowledge at the time of the incident’ (2015: 21).[9] But how can persons answering a survey on their experience of non-consensual sexual penetration comment on the perpetrator’s knowledge? Still, Gittos concludes, ‘the figure of 85,000 potentially includes as victims people who shouldn’t be’ (2015: 23). He does not concede that the figure might also fail to include victims of rape who should be included (e.g. those whose consent was compromised or invalid and those who do not acknowledge let alone report rape due to trauma, stigma or shame).

Gittos asserts that the high figure is indicative of over-reporting (i.e. of calling certain sexual acts ‘rape’ when they are actually not) and of an increase of rape allegations, which for him does not constitute an increase of rapes or of proven allegations. Gittos also decides that included in the high figure is all sorts of ‘perfectly ordinary relationship behaviour’ where things might get ‘a bit frisky’ (2015: 23–24).[10] He attributes this tendency to being ‘routinely bulldozed by the narrative that we live in a “rape culture”’ (2015: 25). Gittos is dismissive of the methods and results of the ONS but he does not propose how more reliable statistics as to the prevalence and incidence of rape might be obtained instead and he does not venture an alternative number. He speaks of the need for ‘an objective and impartial judgement on the evidence’ (2015: 31) but he himself does not present let alone analyze evidence.

Gittos shuts down early on the relevance of the experiences of rape victims to discussion on rape culture and makes no mention of any possibility that certain professionals (e.g. health care workers, social services staff, police officers) have valid input to contribute. Instead, he dismisses the former as ‘endless details about people’s experiences’ (2015: 13),[11] mere anecdotal evidence. But Gittos does find it okay to bring in ‘the views expressed by the lawyers I spoke to’ who ‘often bemoaned the number of rape cases coming to court that had not been properly investigated’.[12] He refers to ‘[o]ne prosecuting barrister I spoke to [who] said that rape trials were becoming “psycho-sexual examinations” of two people’s unsupported word’ (2015: 32). Just as it is Gittos who decides who is ‘hysterical’ and who is ‘objective’ he also decides whose anecdotes are relevant and valid! I am quite certain that one could speak to other lawyers who would tell a different story – like Professor of Law Susan S. M. Edwards, author of Sex and Gender in the Legal Process (Blackstone Press, 1996), who indeed features in a panel discussion chaired by Gittos (see above, The Battle of Ideas).

Granted, reliable rape statistics are difficult to obtain, not least because rape is emotionally fraught terrain. By pointing out that rape allegations are not rapes, that absence of consent to penetration is not always constitutive of rape, because it does not take into account the alleged perpetrator’s knowledge or state of mind (!), and by constantly asserting that a frenzied media and an invasive state instill rape hysteria, Gittos dismisses the ONS figure of an estimated 85,000 rapes of women and girls in one year. He neither permits nor considers counter evidence and offers no method for obtaining data and no figure that he deems more reliable. The support he cites is selectively anecdotal.

Chapter Two of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth

In the second chapter Gittos rails at what he considers intrusions by the law, which seek more and more to regulate intimate relationships. He appears to lament how law addressing domestic violence and violence against women and girls (VAWG) targets ‘what once would have been considered perfectly ordinary intimate behaviour’ (2015: 43). (Ah… the ‘good old days’ … when there was no rape within marriage, when children were told to stop being ‘inappropriate’ when they attempted to describe sexual molestation, when sexual harassment in the workplace was just something you had to put up with…)

Gittos sees great potential for harm in Clare’s Law, which allows any member of the public to apply to the police for information about a person’s previous convictions for violence (2015: 43–44), and finds it disturbing that both stalking and ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in an ‘intimate’ relationship are now criminalized (2015: 44–45). In my view, rather ignoring the intent of the law – hence, Clare’s Law is, as Gittos explains, named after ‘Clare Wood, who was tragically murdered at the hands of her ex-partner, George Appleton, in 2009’, with ‘Appleton ha[ving] a history of violence against women’ (2015: 43) – namely, to protect persons from violence, intimidation and harassment by giving them greater access to relevant information – Gittos makes light of what is often an acutely serious, even deadly, crime. He writes, ‘[a]nyone who claims that they have never controlled or coerced their partners, even in a way which has a “serious” effect on them, is likely to be lying. It would be hard to coordinate meal times or balance family budgets if you didn’t have some degree of control over your partner’s behaviour. …Anyone who has been in love is likely to have gone at least some way to behaving in a manner which could be defined as stalking. …But the law as drafted is drawn so widely that many perfectly normal aspects of intimate behaviour could be caught’ (2015: 45–46). Do laws sometimes get abused? Yes. Do people sometimes get wrongly accused, even convicted? Yes. But it seems far likelier that the domestic violence and VAWG laws were refined in response not to pettiness and not in order to facilitate invasions of privacy, as Gittos implies, but in response to actual violence (directly so, in the case of Clare’s Law) and greater pressure to address such. After all, every single week two women are killed in England and Wales by a current or former partner. Gittos may say that ‘[o]f course, domestic violence is a serious problem’ but he undercuts this with his much greater emphasis on the ‘significant state involvement in the most intimate areas of our lives’ (2015: 47). Frankly, if this ‘involvement’ brings some measure of protection and some public acknowledgement of the scourge of domestic violence, I’ll take it. Again, ONS figures on domestic abuse and stalking are staggering but Gittos no doubt has the same disdain for these statistics as for those on sexual violence.

Gittos also sees evidence of ‘the state’s colonisation of intimacy’ (2015: 38) in family life, including parenting. Interestingly, whereas earlier Gittos does not want to engage with the accounts and experiences of rape victims but rather with what he refers to as objective facts and the words of experts – like the lawyers he has talked to (2015: 32) – when it comes to parenting he favours the ‘judgement of parents based on their own experience’ and expresses indignation that this ‘is seen as of secondary worth to the state-approved advice of “experts”’ (2015: 49). He refers to the difficult case of Ashya King, to point out how harmful state intervention and management can be. While there are high-profile and tragic cases were local authorities failed children who went on to die in their homes (such as Baby P), Gittos makes no attempt to look at (less newsworthy but more numerous) instances where state services intervene to help children at risk in their homes and sometimes from their parents.

Also in this chapter Gittos – for all his apparent open-mindedness (e.g. with regard to sexual experimentation and things getting ‘a bit frisky’, or his opposition to censorship) – reveals a starkly socially conservative side. With regard to same-sex marriage, Gittos expresses some upset with ‘the disregard that many of those in favour of gay marriage showed to the possibility that marriage had a particular tradition that was worth defending’ (2015: 51–52). Again, Gittos refers to ‘[his] personal conversations on the topic’ (2015: 52) – anecdotes and personal experiences are fine when he says they are – and calls many of those in favour of equal marriage rights ‘vitriolic and aggressive’ (i.e. the counterparts to ‘panicked’ and ‘hysterical’ rape culture proponents). He casts them as ‘intolerant’ and dismissive of tradition. Most surprising for me is his statement: ‘[t]here was no public referendum and no evidence that the change [to inclusion of same-sex marriage] was supported by the majority of married people. The possibility that married people had any stake in the institution of marriage was simply brushed aside’ (2015: 52). I am baffled quite why married people should decide whether same-sex couples be legally permitted to marry! Why should married people decide and what precisely is their ‘stake in the institution of marriage’ anyway?? (No one, as far as I am aware, has ever suggested that same-sex marriage is to be the convention instead of opposite-sex marriage… what is the threat here?!)

From here, Gittos continues on something of a tirade. Objectivity and facts do not spring to mind first when one reads: ‘[t]he idea that marriages and family life are best understood by the people involved has become seen as risky and in need of control. The idea that people should be able to marry for “traditional” reasons is seen as reactionary and prejudiced. The idea that parents should be able to dictate what is best for their children is dismissed as willfully neglectful or abusive’ (2015: 53). It is unclear to me just who these fulminating anti-traditionalists and judgers of willfully neglectful and abusive parents are… Gittos does not tell us.

Gittos is dismissive of what either an extension of domestic violence law or consent classes could possibly achieve. He considers both sinister incursions on privacy and intimacy. Regarding the latter, Gittos laments that consent classes imply that ‘what was once an organic and deeply human process, the obtaining of agreement from another human being, can be taught to children much like how they learn a musical instrument’ (2015: 57). I have my doubts that in times past the obtaining of consent was either as organic or deep or naturally practised as Gittos implies (where are reliable statistics and objective facts now?) but I can see how the notion of offering consent classes might seem clunky. It is the case, however – though most of my ‘evidence’, admittedly, is anecdotal and obtained directly (I have two young children) – that children are confronted with many sexual and sexualized messages and images (in the form of music videos, YouTube videos, and so forth), which are widely and rapidly accessible, on demand, at any time on a phone or tablet. Gittos ridicules the notion that a song such as Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines contributes to rape culture (2015: 4) and it is certainly not likely that hearing the song or watching the music video is likely to lead directly to sexual violence. If, however, there is regular and intense exposure to sexually explicit lyrics and, particularly, visual images (such as, sexually explicit music videos, or pornographic films) this is likely to have an effect on a child’s psyche and on psycho-sexual development – particularly if this is not discussed, or put into some sort of context (this being the purpose of the proposed ‘consent classes’).

I am thinking now about a song my nine-year-old enjoys singing, Treat you Better by Shawn Mendes. Many children in my children’s age group could sing all the lyrics to this catchy, soulful song. The song’s video is quite unsettling. It features a moping Mendes thinking about the girl he loves, a fragile, waifish girl, who is together with another man who does not treat her well. The other man is depicted as ‘cool’ (he drives fast and dangerously, he is dominant in his group or gang) and also as violent: he threatens the girl physically, grabbing her by the face, throwing her on to a bed, and she is afraid of him. At the end of the video – in acknowledgment of the disturbing content – a telephone number for the National Domestic Violence hotline flashes up.

Now, relationships like the one in the video, where attraction is mingled with violence, exist. Domestic violence exists – so, why not depict it? The problem arises when children watch such videos without recourse to people and settings where they can be discussed. While Gittos argues against the notion that ‘sexual suggestion is a more common feature of films and music [and that this]… encourages the viewer and the listener to engage in sexual violence’ (2015: 5), I would say that the first part of the statement is difficult to deny. The explosion of continuously available media – primarily through the internet – and accessibility to it through personal devices (computers, tablets, cellphones) has made all kinds of information and content readily available, including a profusion of sexual and sexualized content. The second part of the statement also strikes me as highly likely: after all, it has been amply demonstrated that children who grow up in households where English is spoken, learn to speak English and children who grow up in violent environments are more likely to act violently. So, insistent exposure to sexually explicit and sexually violent images is – it strikes me as a no-brainer – likely to have some effect (likely negative, or at least confusing) on psycho-sexual development. I would agree that it is not as simple as ‘see rape, do rape’[13] but also that discussion with children about matters sexual and relational – in both the home and at school – is a good idea. It is more urgent because more children are seeing more sexual and sexually violent content and are likely to have questions, or concerns.

Consent classes may be a clunky concept – and ideally, there would be no need for them, because children would not be exposed to sexually explicit and sexually violent images and would also have people to hand who talk to them and answer questions – but both the intention of consent classes is and their effect may well be positive. As with domestic violence and VAWG laws, consent classes are not devised to interfere with and invade personal space and privacy but to address pressing concerns.

Gittos concludes the second chapter with first, the assertion that rape is less prevalent than some (unspecified) ‘campaigners, commentators and politicians would have us believe’ (2015: 59–60). I would say he has still not demonstrated this – Gittos only discusses why in his view rape statistics might be unreliable. He does not offer alternative statistics. Also, while he concedes that rape is a hideous crime, he chips away at what constitutes rape, suggesting that even unwanted and non-consensual sex might not actually qualify as rape. Given this chipping away at the definition of rape, no wonder he can decimate rape statistics. But this is a trick of rebranding, rather than of demonstrating that sexual violence is far less prevalent than claimed by the ONS, for instance.

Secondly, Gittos asserts that prosecuting rape nowadays is easier than ever before. I hope this is true and celebrate it. I am certainly relieved that rape in marriage is a crime nowadays[14] and that date rape is taken more seriously in law than it was a generation ago, as well as that rape victims are reportedly treated with more sensitivity, with police officers receiving specialized training.

Thirdly, Gittos locates the ‘dangerous myth’ of rape culture prevalence not in ‘endless academic arguments… [a] buzzword dreamt up in gender studies classes… [or] an insidious tactic by cranky feminists to target and incriminate men’ (2015: 60) (like McElroy) but in the state of our society: namely, a society of people ‘whose members have become fundamentally anxious about relying on their own judgments about intimate life’ (2015: 60). It is unclear in whose interests such a fearful society might be (and things tend to happen because they are in powerful people’s interests). Whereas McElroy blames the ideology of nasty PC feminists, bent on dismantling western civilization and messing with men, Gittos seems to fear ‘the state’ seeking to control its citizens right on into their intimate lives by spreading fear – fear of rape, of sex, of being accused of rape. The agenda, it appears, is rather grand-scale political and of the neo-liberal persuasion, emphasizing the individual over the collective and fanning a fear of widespread and insidious interference.

Gittos’ fear of the state and its meddlesomeness could rather easily be branded in the ways Gittos ridicules rape culture – as panicked, hysterical, or – to use Paglia’s label – neurotic.

Chapter Three of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth

In the third chapter Gittos pursues further the topic of rape and the law. Gittos writes ‘[m]any more situations can be classed as rape today than could be thirty years ago’ (2015: 63). He does not see this or the greater conviction rate for rape crimes as signs of progress, e.g. of more effective processes in gathering data, of treating rape complainants with more sensitivity and professionalism (so that more rape victims will come forward and take their rapists to court in the first place).[15] Gittos, instead, sees convictions to be equated with ‘victories’ and acquittals with ‘defeats’ and considers this an abandonment of the ‘objective and impartial administration of justice’ (2015: 62–63). For him, the odds are stacked in favour of rape complainants and against rape defendants. He also claims that ‘those who claim that we live in a “rape culture” argue that the justice system ignores rape’ (2015: 63; cf. 2015: 86) – which I (as someone who believes my culture is a rape culture – of which more soon) would resist. I do not believe that the justice system ‘ignores’ rape. I believe there is evidence of improvements in the treatment of rape victims by the NHS and its Sexual Assault Referral Centres, by police and courts and in terms of prosecuting rape. Indications are, however, that rape is still underreported and that when rape trials go to court, a low number transpire in conviction.[16] This low conviction rate is in large part due to the nature of the crime: most often in rape cases there are no independent witnesses or (as with other assaults) CCTV data, which can make it difficult for juries to navigate two different statements concerning a sexual encounter. While there is a lot of independent evidence to support under-reporting and low conviction, Gittos, again, damns this evidence (of the ONS, for example).

Also, because he does not consider the testimony of rape victims or rape complainants relevant, or as compelling as his select ‘facts’, he does not consider why anyone who was not raped would put themselves through the ordeal and hassle of a court case. Yes, there have been wrongful accusations of rape, which have gone to court – and such have gravely affected persons innocent of the charges made against them. Such accusations are deplorable. But there is no evidence to suggest that these are commonplace.[17] Reporting on Jemma Beale, who received a ten-year sentence for a series of false rape allegations, Zoe Williams points out, ‘[f]alse rape claims get a lot of publicity, on the basis of that rarity, and the sentencing reflects this urgent sense that other women must be deterred. In fact, women generally do not need to be deterred, any more than they need case law to discourage them from child trafficking or smuggling rhinoceros horns. It is a well-documented nightmare to bring a charge of rape: to do so falsely is vanishingly rare for that reason, and not because we’re all waiting to see what kind of custodial sentence we can get away with’ (2017).

The chapter includes an absorbing discussion on the complexity of ascertaining ‘reasonable’ consent, describing a memorable and awful case, DPP v Morgan , as well as reaction to it. Briefly, in this hideous case three appellants were convicted of rape after a violent attack. The three had been out drinking with a fellow RAF officer who invited them back to his home to have sex with his wife while he watched. He had assured them that she was consenting and that any resistance was part of kinky sex play. The appellants claimed that they had not intended to commit an offence and had reason to believe that consent was in place. In Gittos’ view, responses to this ‘grim’ and ‘egregious’ case (2015: 65, 67) influenced the Sexual Offences Act 2003, because ‘hard cases make bad law’ (2015: 67). In Gittos’ assessment this Act has undertaken ‘a thorough legislative assault on our private lives’ through ‘intrusive surveillance of almost anybody’, as well as through anti-social behaviour orders (ASBO’s), widespread prosecution of children and young persons for sexual offences and ‘compulsory supervision of the state’ of ‘more areas of family life’ (2015: 64). Here again is more of the shrill tone, sounding alarm about ‘the state’. In his view – though Gittos cites no examples here – many of these cases ‘involve those who desperately [need] the authority and guidance of the people around them, rather than the blunt force of the law’ (2015: 71) – but ‘[these] people around them’ do not or should not constitute representatives of ‘the state’, presumably. No experts are cited – there is only vague reference to ‘many suggesting that the cases show how the law around rape has expanded too far’ (2015: 71).

One case that is raised by Gittos is that of Benjamin Bree, which he characterizes as a ‘drunken, regrettable incident between two young people… the sort of encounter which must happen regularly at campuses up and down the country’ (2015: 72). (This may indeed be the case and the vast majority do not go to court – probably for a whole host of reasons, including, sometimes, that when the hangover is past, a court case seems like too much of a hassle, or too embarrassing, or too likely to end with no conviction.) Gittos says confidently that there is ‘no evidence that Bree intended to commit non-consensual penetration’ (2015: 72) – and that may indeed be so (I know no more about the case than what was reported). Gittos laments that there is more scope ‘today… [for] regulating those cases where defendants arguably should have done more to obtain consent’ (2015: 73). Well… good! Maybe more will do more to obtain consent! Maybe more will wake up to the fact that someone unconscious (e.g. in a drunken stupor) cannot give consent and that it is not okay to have sex with them. Moreover, Bree’s conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal – though for Gittos this only confirms that ‘the fact that the case was ever brought in the first place shows the impact of the expansion of the remit of rape’ (2015: 73). Other cases could be cited which show that even when there are insistent complaints about a rapist or group of rapists rape complainants are not taken seriously – because they were drunk, scantily clad, unreliable in other circumstances, or whatever – though in these cases their claims were vindicated. Examples include dozens of on-street grooming scandals where young victims were routinely disbelieved and ignored (by both social services and police), or the case of taxi driver John Worboys who ‘may have drugged, raped and assaulted more than 100 women over six years’, though ‘police repeatedly failed to respond to the claims of his victims’, leading Deputy Commissioner John Yates to acknowledge that ‘[w]e [the police force] need… to reinvent our response in the way that we did in relation to homicide after the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence’.

Gittos chooses not to discuss such cases (and there are very many), focusing instead on cases where a case for ambiguity is easier to make (e.g. Bree, where the call whether this was indeed a case of non-consensual sex, because the woman involved was not conscious to give consent, is difficult to establish), or where the argument that the law got it wrong (which it sometimes does, cf. Gittos 2015: 85) may apply, as in the case of McNally, the transgender teenager accused of deception for not disclosing to his sexual partner that he was born with female genitalia. For Gittos cases like this are ‘because of the panic around rape and rape culture’, which criminalize ‘youthful experimentation’ (2015: 75) but he considers none of the many cases indicating that there is a high number of unequivocal cases of sexual violence (among youth and non-youth) and that these cannot be smoothed over with recourse to ‘experimentation’. It is unhelpful and potentially toxic and cruel to imply that criticism, indignation and concern about sexual violence are due above all to prudish or hysterical disapproval of sex play.

Chapter Four of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth

Gittos’ fourth chapter opens with the claim, ‘[w]e have considered in some detail the facts about rape’ (2015: 78). I would dispute this claim. Gittos has said that rape is a hideous crime – so far so good. He has rejected bringing in the experiences of rape victims or of professionals who work with rape victims or perpetrators. He has asserted that the definition of rape has broadened to include all kinds of activity he considers fine when really its definition, in his view, ought to be very narrow, excluding even instances of penetration where there is no consent (because the perpetrator’s knowledge and state of mind need to be taken into account). He has rejected rape statistics and offered no alternative methods for data collection and no alternative data. He has asserted over and over again that pretty much all claims about rape prevalence and incidence, as well as all statistics indicating a substantial number of sexual assaults, are down to hysteria, panic and the state’s wish to control people’s private lives. I find this hard to bring into line with ‘the facts about rape’. There is no definition, no data, no description of a preferable methodology for obtaining data, and no engagement with counter arguments.

In this chapter Gittos seeks to discuss what he labels (yet again) ‘the absurd moral panic around rape and rape culture’ (2015: 78), again implying that those who subscribe to rape culture are frigid hysterics. The first page contains more ammunition to support this characterization: rape culture proponents are ‘hysterical, unthinking’, as well as ‘deeply censorious’ encouraging ‘intolerance of any attitude that is seen to offend or even challenge the contemporary consensus around rape’ (2015: 78) (is there such a consensus??).[18]

Until now Gittos has not attended to racialized dimensions in rape discourse, only throwing in a line, with reference to a Ministry of Justice report of 2010, that there is ‘no evidence for racial bias against black [rape] defendants, even in all-white juries’ (2015: 35). Counter-evidence – of which plenty exists – is not referred to, let alone discussed. Now he uses a citation from a racist apologist, dating to 1905, to argue that such apologist rhetoric, maligning black men as sexually uncontrolled, underpins ‘the logic of the contemporary rape culture argument’ (2015: 80). Hmmm. This is further augmented by the opinion of Gittos’ editor at Spiked who sees parallels between KKK tactics to generate rape hysteria and ‘the panic around rape today’ (2015: 81). (It must be true if ‘evidence’ from 1905 and Gittos’ editor say it is – right?) While Gittos goes on to say ‘[o]f course, the racist dynamic that propelled the rape culture argument in the past does not apply in today’s context’ (2015: 82), the use of one (racists) to tarnish another (proponents of rape culture) has already occurred, because, for Gittos, ‘the racist fear-mongers of the past and the feminist fear-mongers of today’ share characteristics (2015: 83). This is a dirty tactic if ever there was one. The shared characteristic is that ‘both portray people as culturally determined’, which Gittos then equates with being ‘constantly susceptible to manipulation by the “culture” they see around them’ (2015: 82). There is no mention of this ‘culture’ also reflecting people and their attitudes. ‘Culture’ is not so much imposed from outside as generated by the people who use it and by their demands.

Gittos goes on to claim that in the past feminists had reason to rail at the treatment of rape victims. Back then (in the 1970s and 1980s) ‘feminists … were able to identify objective political realities’ (2015: 86) – but nowadays, with ‘[a] small army of specially trained police officers to deal with every aspect of rape allegations’ and with ‘prosecutors … desperate to prosecute rape in the most public way possible’ (this is balanced?!) (2015: 85), ‘the absence of those realities… means that those who are convinced we live in a rape culture have to create their own realities’ (2015: 86). Like with ‘alternative facts’ these created realities add up, of course, to lies. Hence, everything all rape culture proponents claim is fabrication ‘[i]n the absence of real social factors making women more vulnerable to rape’ (2015: 86). What an insult to persons who have endured rape, to whole groups of people who are disproportionately vulnerable to rape – such as the homeless, survivors of child sexual abuse, black or minority ethnic persons and the disabled [see Rape Crisis UK statistics]. Distressing statistics and testimony such as those gathered by Rape Crisis UK, however, are dismissed by Gittos as rooted in ‘a deeply personal, subjective conception of what constitutes “culture”’ (2015: 87).

Next, Gittos states that ‘[a]cademic research has consistently failed to demonstrate the link between pornography, computer games, music videos and other cultural phenomena and the prevalence of sexual violence’ (2015: 89–90). Really? More accurately, there is no consistency in research studies (nothing unusual there) but there is actually a great deal of research that demonstrates such links: e.g. ‘The Impact of Violence in the Media – Research from Oxford’, and research by the American Psychological Association among very many more, which can be found with ease in any number of journals from the social sciences – though Gittos, again, fails to consider it and to accuse, instead, rape culture proponents for ‘play[ing] fast and loose with research’ (2015: 90). Ironic…

Having not considered the formidable body of academic research, Gittos proceeds to diss academics by implying that they tend to waste their time anyway: ‘we hardly need academics to tell us that people can still be sexist. …in bars across the world, women run the risk of being touched in bars by sexist men. But equally, I don’t need to be a criminologist to know that these studies say nothing about the existence of a rape culture’ (2015: 91). So… academia has nothing to teach Gittos – he knows it all and if he doesn’t know something, lawyers he knows, a friend, or his editor can provide ‘facts’. Well… such claims would not be adequate for passing an essay in one of my modules at University.

Although the Steubenville and Ched Evans cases are named in the subtitle of his book, Gittos only refers to them now – and briefly. He calls Steubenville ‘a tragedy for all involved’ (2015: 93) but saves particular sympathy for the boys, who were only children. Gittos claims not to be troubled by Evans’s conviction (suggesting that he finds the conviction reasonable – presumably, because he agrees that Evans raped a woman who could not give consent) but he saves the bulk of his outrage for the ‘mob justice’ of rape culture adherents defending ‘their worldview’ (2015: 94). Many of those outraged were not really talking about rape culture but about a man who raped an unconscious woman. Angry responses to Evans returning to Sheffield United often responded to his lack of contrition or apology to the rape victim. But Gittos considers Evans a victim of rape culture harpies who determine that ‘the normal rules of society, by which we tend to allow people the space to live their lives as they choose within the limits of the law, should not apply’ (2015: 96). Gittos deems this ‘abandonment of objectivity, impartiality and judgement’ (2015: 96). But, of course, the way things played out (albeit after the publication of Gittos’ book) following the Criminal Cases Review Commission and Court of Appeal trial saw Evans’s conviction (with which Gittos had no trouble – because it is not in dispute that he had sex with a woman who was very intoxicated and unable to give consent) quashed.

In the course of Evans’s appeal the complainant’s sexual history was brought before the court, an invasive tactic that has raised alarm among a considerable number of lawyers. Vera Baird refers to this as an acquittal gained by prejudice against the sexual choices of the complainant. She states that ‘[w]e seem to be returning to a mindset and practices we thought were confined to history’, a time where fear of having one’s private life disclosed in a court setting deterred rape victims from reporting assaults (2016). Because the rape claimant in the Evans case had had separate sexual encounters with two men around the time of the rape encounter with Evans and because on those occasions she had had a lot to drink and taken initiative in sex, the case was made that sex with Evans constituted similar or typical behaviour, a pattern. In other words, someone who will get drunk and consent to sex with two men, will also when drunk have sex with Ched Evans…?! The subtext here is, ‘she had it coming’. Had she accused all three men of rape there might have been a case for a pattern. Because she did not, it could very well be the case that the complainant knew full well when she had given consent and when not. The disclosure in court of the claimant’s sex life is likely to have been humiliating. Who was really on trial here? Who is moralistic and censorious here? How does a tactic like this not downplay the seriousness of rape? How does it not target the victim? How does this bear out Gittos’ claim that rape is taken very seriously and that the law is stacked in favour of the complainant? Is this a one off? It seems not: Baird points out that ‘[o]ne in five trials sees an application for sexual history to be heard, even now’ (2016).

Gittos extends his pretty constant litany of claims about rape culture proponents being hysterical and irrational by claiming that ‘[w]hile portraying groups of men [e.g. members of athletic teams and fraternities] as savages in need of reining in, the rape culture argument also portrays women as incapable of negotiating their sex lives for themselves’ (2015: 99). Again, I certainly do not recognize myself in this depiction. The rape complainant in the Evans case was deemed incapable of negotiating her sex life for herself, being depicted in court as someone who habitually gets drunk and will sleep with anyone and not even know the next day who that might have been. In my view there are indications here – and this is not an isolated case – of a wider cultural context where double-standards about sex persist, where the complainant was judged on account of having had consenting sex while drunk with two other men and therefore to have been consenting to sex with Evans (or to have been reasonably considered consenting). Evans’s sexual proclivities, meanwhile – he had another sexual partner at this time, too – were not held to the same standard. Also indicative of a toxic rape culture climate were the many vitriolic things said about the claimant. Where Gittos focuses on what he calls the ‘mob’ who were outraged at Evans rejoining Sheffield United he makes no word of the mob who outed and vilified and slut-shamed the woman who brought the case against him. She was accused of being a gold-digger – then why try to maintain anonymity? – and of crying rape after regretting sex – then why not do the same after sex with the other men? The treatment of the complainant is very difficult to justify – or to account for other than with recourse to a cultural climate in which (for all the improvements in laws pertaining to rape and for all the resistance to rape culture) rape myths – such as that women will falsely report rape to get back at a man or seek attention, or that a woman who gets drunk and acts flirtatiously is fair game – persist.

Whereas Gittos dissected and rejected the ONS statistics, he readily accepts statistics that he finds agreeable. Hence, he cites research by the University of Bolton, according to which ‘more than a quarter of respondents interact socially with others only once a week’ (2015: 102). He does not subject the methodology or results of this research to any degree of scrutiny but uses these findings to argue for the alienation and sense of personal vulnerability wrought by the state’s intimacy-surveillance, which is (he has told us many times now) fuelled by rape culture panic. Deprived of sexual experimentation, which is, Gittos has told us, so bluntly dealt with in draconian and intrusive fashion by the nasty state, young people now resort to sexting in ‘place of old forms of youthful intimate behaviour’ (2015: 103). Again striking a surprisingly conservative tone, Gittos comments further that: ‘[r]ates of cohabitation, in preference to marriage, are rising year on year. The age that people get married is similarly increasing, as is the age that people have children. This aversion to commitment of any kind, an elevation of temporary satisfaction and self-validation over and above traditional commitments, shows that today’s young people are fundamentally sceptical about committing to anything that carries the potential to impact on their self-esteem’ (2015: 105). Whoa… is this what passes as ‘objective’, ‘factual’, ‘calm’, ‘reasoned’, ‘level-headed’? How is cohabitation not a commitment, or – necessarily – a lesser commitment than marriage? Are there not all kinds of reasons why people choose not to marry, or to marry later? Are there not all kinds of reasons why people postpone having children, or choose not to have children at all, that do not stem from commitment-aversion? Isn’t it pretty presumptuous and simplistic to reduce it all to self-esteem, temporary satisfaction and self-validation? And what is this ‘traditional commitment’ and why is it preferable? There is so much that is reductionist, baseless and – frankly – stupid and out-of-touch with this statement…

Chapter Five of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth

In this final chapter Gittos takes on social and other online media for disseminating allegations. Such ‘online tribunals’ (2015: 107), he points out, provide neither justice, nor the truth. At best they are ‘a very weak form of therapy’ (2015: 108) or ‘hashtag justice’ (2015: 111).

It is not difficult to think of valid examples for this claim. Social and other online media come with the potential to spread an image or story rapidly and widely. This has given rise to new lingo: ‘going viral’ and ‘meme’, for instance. And no, what gets widely disseminated is certainly not always balanced, or factual, or deserving of the attention it receives. When Dr Matt Taylor wore a shirt depicting semi-naked women while reporting on the progress of the Rosetta Mission the furore was – in my view – over the top. (I am more interested in the mission and more unhappy about the under-representation of women in the sciences and the gender pay-gap than I am bothered about a garish shirt.) But this is the way of the internet and its wide reach and most thinking people, increasingly accustomed to such phenomena, know this. Much of what flares up one day is quickly forgotten soon after. Think of ‘Kony 2012’, the short-lived rallying call by Invisible Children: one day tens and hundreds of thousands, including Rihanna, were committing not to rest until Joseph Kony was captured by the end of 2012; soon after, nothing, with Kony still not behind bars. (As of April 2017 Ugandan and US military forces ended their hunt for Kony). Some of what is reported online and explodes into prominence is indeed disproportionate.

For Gittos, however, such tendencies have led to ‘blindly acknowledging the status of [rape] complainants as victims’ (2015: 110).[19] Be it revelations emerging from Operation Yewtree, or allegations against Lord Janner addressed in the Goddard Inquiry, or against Terry Richardson, or Bill Cosby – Gittos presses on with his point that none of these allegations should be stirred up in the media until persons are convicted of criminal action. He makes no room for the possibility that such publicity can also encourage persons who have been sexually assaulted to come forward. With the Janner case Gittos has no time for complainants who want their experiences confirmed by an official tribunal (2015: 111), while the models working with Richardson should have been more clued up (2015: 115).

Gittos goes on to say that ‘for many of those who believe that we live in a rape culture, allegations are automatically assumed to be true’ (2015: 122). This certainly does not represent me. It is important to conduct proper and full investigations. But – in the many on-street grooming rings, in the case of John Worboys, where these investigations have been conducted – there were clear patterns of perpetrators selecting and abusing victims. And, in the allegations against Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby similar patterns are emerging. Does this prove every allegation made against either? No. But there is just cause in these cases to give credence to the complainants and to suspect the alleged perpetrators. Gittos’ claim, ‘[w]hen you believe in a rape culture you don’t believe in innocence, you merely believe in those rapists who have been caught and those who have “gotten away with it” because of the endemic influence of toxic cultural misogyny’ (2015: 122), is inflammatory and sweeping – rather like the online media wild-fires to which he objects.

The principle of innocent until proven guilty is an important one. In rape cases, as stated earlier, proof can be difficult to obtain, because it can come down to two disparate accounts of one incident. But it is unclear to me why Gittos is so much more loathe to trust the allegation of a rape claimant than the protestation of innocence of an alleged perpetrator. Gittos is outraged that Ben Sullivan, president of the Oxford debating club, was advised to resign or take a leave of absence while a criminal investigation was under way. MPs under investigation for financial scandals are suspended until guilt or otherwise is established; children believed to be at serious risk of harm or neglect in their homes are removed until the situation is fully investigated – in both such instances prior to conviction – and there is surely good cause for this.

Concluding Comments

It is easier to be neoliberal, capitalist, or a sex-positive feminist, or someone who experiments with their sexuality if you have a voice and financial security, plus the confidence and sometimes entitlement that come with these. While it does not protect or ensure against rape (which cuts across social and socio-economic sectors) it is easier, too, to avoid the underbelly of the sex industry, or to hire a lawyer, if you have confidence, a voice, an income. It is no accident that certain rape criminals – such as on-street groomers or sex-traffickers – target vulnerable persons (by far predominantly girls and women in most reported instances) who are deprived in terms of a voice, social status or economic autonomy and power. Their stories, or the stories of those who represent these victims of rape are not in Gittos’ field of vision. He says that rape is a hideous crime and there is no reason to disbelieve that he has empathy for rape victims but he does not tell or allude to their stories or their suffering. Claiming the territory of judgment, objectivity and facts and defining rape culture as not about rape but about an amplification of hysteria, panic and media frenzy, that inflate and distort statistics and deprive regular people of an intimate life and the freedom to experiment sexually, Gittos in effect dismisses the testimony of rape victims. He shifts the focus in a way that makes him the decider of whose verdicts and stories matter – like the assessments of the unnamed lawyers he has spoken to, or the story of M, maligned as a sex offender when he may only have been dabbling in sex play (though Gittos does not have, or does not present a full account of what happened to whom). It is also Gittos who decides who is witch-hunted by the media – Ched Evans, the men of Steubenville – could the same not be said for the woman who brought charges against Evans, or even of Jemma Beale?

Gittos writes, ‘[t]his book is not about rape. …This book is about the contemporary panic around “rape culture” that … often bears little resemblance to the reality of rape’ (2015: 15–16). But I am not convinced that it is possible to talk about rape culture without talking about rape, or the reality of rape. Rape happens in a context. The way rape is understood, characterized, depicted, responded to, addressed in law and the public domain, and so forth, has bearing on the cultural context – and vice versa, cultural context has bearing on rape.[20] Understandably, because rape is a ‘hideous criminal offence’ (Gittos 2015: 15) and because its consequences can be devastating and life-changing discussion about rape can be emotional and distressing. This need not, however, make it ipso facto panicky, feverish and hysterical. By insistently stating or implying that this is the case, the argument is rigged.

Gittos is not calm or level-headed. He makes many sweeping claims and his tactic is to caricature those he is opposing and to label them over and over as hysterical, panicked, feverish, narcissistic, and so forth, while calling his own tactics rational, factual, objective. But these self-designations are not borne out by his methods, such as dismantling rather than also presenting statistics, or discounting some anecdotes and opinions while validating others (of his friend, editor, lawyers he knows).

It is important to probe and question statistics. The difficulty of obtaining statistics on rape is widely acknowledged. Gittos’ endeavour is centred entirely on challenging statistics, such as those of the ONS. Having done so, he concludes that the actual rate of rape is much, much lower than statistics indicate. But he arrives at this conclusion without either addressing arguments suggesting that the ONS statistics are likely to be conservative, or addressing the statistics of organizations working with victims of rape and sex trafficking, or providing his own reliable statistics.

What Gittos describes in his depiction of an interfering state, utilizing inflated and unfounded fear of men and rape to invade people’s private sphere and control them through making them vulnerable through fear, is what is called in social sciences literature ‘deviance amplification’. This is described as follows:

For whatever reason, some issue is taken up by the mass media of communication […] The sensationalized representation of the event makes it appear that there is a new and dangerous problem which must be taken seriously. In practice, the problem, however dangerous or socially threatening, will not be new [or even real], but some dramatic example will have caught the attention of the media. Their distorted and sensationalized coverage creates a moral panic which also leads to increased police action and to more arrests of offenders. The higher arrest rate is seen as a confirmation of the growth of the problem […] The police respond to this evidence of public concern with yet more arrests, and so on. (D. Jary, D. and J. Jary, eds (1995), Collins Dictionary of Sociology (2nd edn), London: HarperCollins.1995: 164).

One classic example of deviance amplification is Satanic Ritual Abuse (see Stiebert 2016:41). Allegations of such abuse flared in Great Britain in about 1990 and created a nationwide scare. In the wake of this, children were removed from their homes, reputations were tarnished – but even a six-year investigation into Satanic Ritual Abuse by a commission chaired by Jean La Fontaine found no evidence at all to substantiate any charges whatsoever. Gittos suggests a similarly empty panic about rape culture but the difference is that a deluge of incidents and of research, which he chooses to dismiss or ignore, indicates otherwise.

As with climate change deniers and Holocaust deniers, Gittos dismisses or ignores extensive research and the thousands of first-hand experience accounts of rape victims and rape support service professionals (e.g. in the NHS, or Rape Crisis UK). Labeling these as hysterical, narcissistic, panicked and so forth, he fails to provide his own statistics and proposes that his version of events – a sinister state seeking to control people’s most private spheres of life by spreading so much fear of rape at every turn that a huge section of the population becomes so terrified as to agree to more state control – is accurate. But how plausible is that really? About as plausible as large-scale production of fake concentration camp facilities and data, or of a gigantic scientists’ conspiracy to spread fear about global warming, purely so they can make SUV drivers miserable. Come on… Who is really hysterical here?

This brings me to rape culture. It is quite true that rape culture is a variable phenomenon – as is ‘feminism’ (which embraces such disparate figures as Andrea Dworkin and Wendy McElroy) and ‘democracy’ (which can refer to the political systems of both ancient Athens and contemporary India). Having a broad meaning does not invalidate the concept, though it may require refining.

It is the case that rape culture can refer to very different societies and it is ill-advised to associate the rape culture of, on the one hand, sexual warfare in places such as IS-controlled territories or Darfur, where women and girls are raped as a strategy of targeted terrorization, humiliation and intimidation, with, on the other hand, the rape culture of the contemporary UK. I am not denying that rape is criminalized in the UK that there aren’t protections (including legal ones) for victims of rape or that there haven’t been advances in terms of the treatment of victims of rape and of rape complainants. Persons living in the UK are less likely to be raped than Yazidi women and girls in IS-controlled territory, or impoverished persons in India or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The reason I still find ‘rape culture’ a legitimate designation for the contemporary UK is that rape is a high incidence crime and a crime that has very damaging effect on the raped. While, yes, precise numbers of rape incidence are difficult to obtain (and this is not denied even in the preamble of the ONS statistics), independently obtained data and data from organizations at the frontline of rape (e.g. Rape Crisis) is startling, running into the tens of thousands annually. Rape does not exist in a vacuum – any more than rising obesity and eating disorder rates do. Reducing rape to something committed by a few ‘bad people’ or obesity to ‘people who eat too much’ or eating disorders to a few picky eaters ignores larger forces and influences. And there is plenty of research to back this up and to show that there are – in the case of rape – connections between exposure to sexually violent content and enacted sexual violence. Of course this is not as straightforward as listening to a song like Blurred Lines or Treat You Better and then (as a male) wanting to rape or (as a female) expecting to be raped. But cultural expressions (songs, films, fashion advertisements) both influence and are influenced by the people in whose midst they exist and operate.

Gittos’ book is not balanced, not well argued and not persuasive. He does a lot of name calling, accusing rape culture proponents of panic mongering and hysteria, comparing them to racists and calling them cold-hearted narcissists. With all this labeling of panicked hysterics, he then goes on (in rather inflammatory fashion) to fan panic about a fear-spreading surveillance state where young people have no freedoms (particularly none to sexually experiment) and can’t commit, or even communicate with each other any more, where men are rapists until proven innocent and parents have no parental rights. He claims to have given the facts on rape but ignores the testimony of rape victims and rape care professionals, as well as statistics by independent bodies and a wealth of research in the social sciences. He justifies his own claims by rubbishing academia, discussing select cases and weighing in with the words of lawyers he knows and of friends. If this passes as level-headed research, research is doomed.

[1] Opposition to all forms of censorship characterizes the magazine’s stance. Its publications have spoken out against laws targeted at pedophiles (for being counterproductive and inciting mob mentality), as well as against the scientific consensus on global warming, political correctness, restrictions on immigration, humanitarian intervention, and the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

[2] As mentioned earlier, feminism is a poly-vocal movement. It includes feminists who abhor men. Yet the characterization of all feminists (or even of a substantial percentage of feminists) who are not ‘real feminists’ (of the McElroy variety) as man-haters is crass and inaccurate.

[3] Similarly, Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, claims to be a real-deal feminist, as is captured in the title of her video blog, The Factual Feminist. She contrasts her own ‘equity feminism’ with what she calls ‘victim feminism’, which, again, is characterized as irrationally hostile to men and as incapable of regarding the sexes as ‘equal but different’ [see Hoff Sommers Wikipedia]. Hoff Sommers is one member of The Battle of Ideas panel on the topic of rape culture, chaired by Gittos (see reference above).

[4] This tendency occurs elsewhere in Gittos’ book, too. He decides what constitutes panic and frenzy and what constitutes ‘objectivity and judgment’ (2015: 17–18) or the ‘real roots of rape culture’ (2015: 38, italics mine). Similarly, McElroy refers to rape culture proponents as ‘draconian’ (2016: 1) and Paglia as ‘neurotic’ (2013).

[5] McElroy is also no rape apologist. She is upfront about being a victim of rape and writes: ‘[n]o one who knows my history can doubt how seriously I take rape; no one can doubt that I empathize. The issue once devastated my life’. She is also justly angry about any assumption that deniers of rape culture ‘are indifferent or callous towards victims’ (2016: 11) – like I am angry to be cast as a man-hater who delights in male-male rape (see above).

[6] Statistics for child abuse (sexual and otherwise) and for domestic violence are also difficult to obtain. I discuss elsewhere the disparate statistics pertaining to incest, focusing most closely on father-daughter incest. In the course of this I examine the disturbing potential of Ian Hacking’s argument, as developed in his monograph The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), that incidence of child sexual abuse and incest are grossly exaggerated. There is affinity in terms of incest denial and rape culture denial. See Johanna Stiebert, First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 596), London, New York: T&T Clark, 2016, pp.35–43.

[7] Gittos does not examine male-male rape in any focused way. The conviction of M, with which his book opens, pertains to male-male rape.

[8] I, on the other hand, find it understandable that anyone seeking rape statistics would turn to the ONS, because it is the largest independent producer of official statistics, which are annually updated. Gittos offers no alternative source or data.

[9] Gittos returns to a similar point later, stating ‘“[u]nwanted” is not the same as non-consensual. A person can agree to have sex even if they don’t want it for all sorts of reasons. Even if sex in a particular situation were non-consensual, whether you were raped would depend in part on the state of mind of the person you are accusing’ (2015: 54). It is not unimportant to be concise or to define one’s terms but this kind of language dissection can get very slippery and has the potential virtually to define rape out of existence. It has the ring of ‘alternative facts’. Survey responders can report on their experience and assessment of a sexual act – not on another’s knowledge or state of mind!

[10] So, if one survey respondent considers sexual penetration to have taken place without their consent, but Gittos, or another participant in the same act considers the activity enjoyable or normal then it is not rape? Again, who gets to decide?

[11] Pace McElroy, who writes in her book on rape culture: ‘in a book about rape, having first-hand knowledge seems significant. It gives me perspective that most women happily lack’ (2016: 6).

[12] Later, too, Gittos affirms a point he is making (about how the past is reinvented in the present) with reference to a discussion ‘with a friend of mine’ (2015: 57; cf. also the reference to ‘[m]y editor at Spiked’, 2015: 81). So, the input of lawyers he knows and of his friends and editor has validity but the experiences of those who have been raped, or of those who work on the ground with victims of sexual violence has not. Rape is played down and Gittos’ claim that rape culture is the outgrowth of subverted feminism, hysterical media reporting and, above all, an intrusive state is insistently asserted.

[13] Gittos does try to imply that this is what rape culture proponents do think: ‘[rape culture] suggests that the people around us are incapable of hearing certain lyrics without being encouraged to rape. It suggests that banal and childish misogyny is capable of affecting people’s view of women to such an extent that they become more likely to commit horrific crimes’ (2015: 79). Of course things are more complicated. Then again, if children are persistently surrounded with ‘childish misogyny’ why would they not find it confusing or affecting?

[14] Even Gittos seems to agree, referring to ‘the archaic marital exemption’ (2015: 85).

[15] Later Gittos does state that in the 1970s and 1980s ‘there were real forces to battle against which prevented the effective prosecution of rape’ (2015: 85) – by implication, as opposed to the ‘nonsense’ that passes for rape now. Here and elsewhere, however, he is referring to what he deems the regrettable and improper extension of law for prosecuting sexual offences (including behaviour Gittos designates not an offence but, instead, ‘experimentation’).

[16] The ONS survey reports that an estimated 19% of offences that should be recorded as crimes are not and that the ‘greatest level of under-recording [is] seen for sexual offences and violence against the person offences’ (an estimated 26% of sexual offences are not being recorded as crimes) [https://www.ons.gov.uk]. According to Rape Crisis only 15% of those who experience sexual violence report to the police and only 5.7% of reported rape cases end in a conviction [www.rapecrisis.org.uk]. Gittos, of course, roundly condemns such statistics. For an alternative legal perspective to Gittos’ and for how implicit bias and discrimination operate within the legal system, see S. M. Edwards, Sex and Gender in the Legal Process (Blackstone Press, 1996)

[17] False accusations of rape do make good news. Also, unhelpfully, lies about having been raped and accusing someone who did not rape of rape are often conflated with rape that is ‘no-crimed’ (e.g. where there may be a suspicion that unwanted sex has taken place but due to drink or drug-induced incapacity there is no credible evidence for the suspicion) or with false allegations due to mental health or drugs and with rape retractions (which need not by any means indicate that rape did not take place) [e.g. see ‘False allegations’, www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk]. In a seventeen month period in 2011 and 2012 there were 35 prosecutions for false rape accusations, over against 5651 prosecutions for rape (that is 0.62%) (see Zoe Williams 2017). A number of these false allegations, moreover, can be accounted for by mental illness. Even of hate-figure Jemma Beale, depicted in the media as a ‘lesbian fantasist’ [ see Victoria Ward, 24 August 2017, The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk] and as ‘attention-seeking’ and costing taxpayers £900,000 pounds [https://www.thesun.co.uk, by Amanda Devlin, 24 August 2017], it might legitimately be said (without apologizing for her actions) that ‘no one turns their life into a construct of bogus victimhood for fun’ [see Zoe Williams, ‘Jemma Beale…’ 2017].

[18] This kind of rhetoric continues. Hence, rape culture proponents are prone to ‘violent and unthinking responses to individual cases’ (2015: 91) and exhibit the ‘navel-gazing narcissism inherent in the rape culture argument, which leads to a complete loss of moral perspective’ (2015: 93). And again: ‘the argument that we live in a rape culture is often used to justify petty authoritarianism, which – in turn – is symptomatic of the argument’s narcissistic and self-centred heart’ (2015: 99). This kind of talk can pass for level-headed and calm? Really?!

[19] Gittos refers to persons acquitted of rape as innocent (2015: 131) when, technically, they may not be.

[20] On 6 March 2014 RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network) released a lengthy report, which, among other recommendations identifies overemphasis on the concept of rape culture as an obstruction in both the prevention of rape and in accounting for causes of rape. The crux of its recommendation is that rape is caused not so much by cultural/systemic factors as by the conscious decisions of members of a small percentage of the community. These rapists are individuals who disregard the dominant cultural message that rape is wrong. According to RAINN, blaming rape culture rather than individuals mitigates personal responsibility. McElroy takes a similar stance. She is open about having been raped and domestically assaulted and asserts, ‘I was not attacked by men but by an individual man, and I hold those individuals responsible. … I know the rape culture is a lie that harms women and victims of violence as well as men’ (2016: 5–7). I am cutting corners here – but, in brief, to me this kind of argument about wrongs being down to ‘a few bad apples’ is rather like the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ argument. On one level it may be so – but it misses the bigger point. Quite simply, gun crime is more prevalent in places where more people have more access to guns and also, where gun culture glamourizes and glorifies guns. The US and its statistics on gun fatalities bear this out. Emphasis on the systemic, rather than the ‘bad individuals’ argument can also make sense of other social ills, such as the much greater incarceration rate of blacks than whites in the US. The alternative conclusion, veering from systemic to individual onus, is that blacks are more likely to be bad people. A viewing of Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th (2016) will set the record straight on this.

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The Lamentation of Jamie Fraser: Outlander, Male Rape and an Intertextual Reading of Lamentations 3

The following post is a shortened and abbreviated version of a forthcoming chapter in the Gender Violence, Rape Culture, and Religion  series (Palgrave Macmillan)

With the end of a two-year wait for the third season of Outlander (known to its dedicated audience as The Droughtlander), there is a lot for fans to celebrate. The series has, so far, been met with widespread acclaim, and has been renewed for a fourth season. Adapted from a popular series of novels written by Diana Gabaldon, Outlander tells the story of Claire Randall, an English nurse during World War Two, who, on a visit to Scotland, is transported back in time to 1753, where she meets her soon-to-be lover and husband, Jamie Fraser, a Jacobite rebel.

So, what is special about Outlander, and why is it relevant to discussions around rape culture in contemporary society? Described as “unapologetically feminist since its inception,” the Outlander television series challenges mainstream representations of sex, from addressing sexual violence to providing a “rare acknowledgment of the female gaze” through its cinematographic focus on both men’s and women’s bodies.

What has captured particular media interest, however, is Outlander’s treatment of male rape. At the end of the first Outlander novel, and depicted in the final two episodes of Season One (“Wentworth Prison” and “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”), Jamie (the male protagonist) is tortured and raped by army officer Captain Jack Randall.

These episodes received much media attention, with many of the show’s viewers praising the sensitivity and integrity with which the oft taboo issue of male rape was portrayed. The violence of the scene was hard to watch, but equally hard was witnessing the way that Jamie’s entire persona – his psychological, emotional, and spiritual self – was splintered in the aftermath of his assault.

I found the episode deeply thought-provoking, not least because it brought to mind another “text of terror” which likewise grants painful witness to a man’s suffering as the result of trauma: the “Man of Sorrows” poem in Lamentations 3. Considering these two texts intertextually alongside each other, I want to suggest that, like Jamie, the Man’s suffering evoked in Lamentations 3 can be read as an expression of the trauma of rape.

The vivid depictions of torture perpetrated against both Jamie and the Man are strikingly similar in both intertexts. Like Jamie, the Man is bound in chains (3:7). His bones are broken, and his skin is wasting away (3:4), just as Jamie suffers broken ribs and “smashed bones” after being beaten by Randall (Outlander, p.748).

The Man feels torn to pieces (3:11); he is made to “cower in ashes” (3:16) and is penetrated with arrows (3:12). Jamie, meanwhile, is burned with a brand that leaves his skin “puckered, reddened and blistered … charred, rimmed with white ash” (p.742); moreover, his hand is pierced with a nail when Randall pins it to the table (p.721), and his body too is penetrated through the brutal act of rape. These shared experiences of violence and suffering connect our two male characters together, allowing us to see them both as victims and survivors of the most dreadful abuses.

An intertextual reading of Lamentations 3 alongside Outlander (a full treatment of which can be found in my upcoming book chapter) highlights the various tropes of male rape that can be discerned within this biblical lament. These include, but are not limited to:

  • The trauma of intimacy as the Man struggles to reconcile his suffering with God’s love, and Jamie who, after his rape, cannot be touched by Claire (p.790).
  • Humiliation, shame and a perceived loss of masculinity with the Man describing himself as hunted prey (3:10-11) and Jamie telling Claire “I didna use to think myself a coward, but I am. I had no reason to live, but I was not brave enough to die” (p.733).
  • Victim-blaming is ubiquitous in contemporary rape culture and features heavily in both men’s experiences. The Man laments that “We have transgressed and rebelled, and you have not forgiven” (v.42) thus making a direct link between his own actions and subsequent suffering. Jamie’s abuser asks him “How could [Claire] ever forgive you?”; suggesting that Jamie’s rape was something he had done, rather than something done to him, and should therefore be accountable for.

These themes, which are often overlooked in the biblical text, are brought into sharp relief as we view the experiences of the suffering Man alongside those of Jamie Fraser. Although I cannot claim that the author(s) of Lamentations 3 intended to portray the suffering Man’s experience as that of male rape, an analysis of this lament, read intertextually alongside Jamie Fraser’s own narrative, affirms that such a reading is possible. For these two texts share a number of allusions to gendered violence that invites us to at least consider the suffering Man’s experiences in light of male rape.

 The possibility that Lamentations 3 gives voice to the experiences of a male rape victim is rarely entertained by interpreters of this text. This may be due, in part at least, to the veil of silence that so often shrouds this particular form of gender violence in both public discourses and popular culture.

In contrast, it is as though female rape has become “enduring and inevitable” within dominant discourses of gender and sexuality, contributing to what Roxanne Gay describes as a “cultural numbness” around female sexual violence (just think of the many instances of female rape in television shows such as Game of Thrones – and even Outlander!) On the contrary, people are less able to cope with (as in Outlander) or even recognize (as with Lamentations 3) any narrative of rape that fails to comply with these dominant discourses, including male rape.

The result is an overwhelming elision of gender violence from our cultural consciousness, either because it is simply “expected” (in the case of female rape) or, conversely, it is deemed too unexpected, or shocking (as with male rape).

This, then, is why the depiction of male rape in Outlander is so important – it refuses to elide or deny the perpetuation of such violence within contemporary rape cultures; moreover, this too is why we need to consider the possibility of male rape in Lamentations 3. For both texts remind us of the violent and brutal reality of sexual violence perpetrated against men; these texts also bear powerful witness to the trauma felt by male victims in the aftermath of their assault, as they face the ongoing battle of re-traumatization.

Finally, these two intertexts also offer a sense of hope that survival after rape is possible – it may be lengthy and difficult, but it is possible nonetheless. After “Wentworth Prison” and “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” were aired, over two hundred viewers (not just men) posted messages on Gabaldon’s Facebook page, grateful for the overarching message of the episodes: that, despite the uncompromising brutality and torture Jamie had endured, they were left with “hope, catharsis and a sense that healing was possible” for survivors of rape.

If Claire stands as the one bringing healing to Jamie, through listening to him, believing him, and refusing to let him blame himself for his rape, perhaps we can perform this same role for the Man of Lamentations, and for all survivors of sexual violence.

 

Emma Nagouse is a WRoCAH funded PhD student in the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS) researching the phenomenon of rape culture in the Bible and contemporary society. Emma’s research focuses around how biblical and contemporary intersectional gender presentation facilitates rape and disbelief culture through reaffirming oppressive stereotypes and informing perceptions of rape gradations. Emma is Assistant Editor of the University of Sheffield History Matters blog and co-organiser of the Sheffield Feminist Archive (SFA).

 

Image: Outlander [via Flickr]

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