I dunno. Do people also think the government is out to personally get them?
It's a nice fantasy that people create to make themselves feel more important than they actually are. No different than the people who believe that all Muslims are terrorists out to get white suburbia, or that blacks are all thieves who will indoctrinate your children into gang culture through rap music. If you really want to get an accurate measurement of what a culture thinks of rape, just look to its laws and artistic expressions. Art reflects a culture's feelings, and law reflects a culture's values.
In the western world, rape is a crime considered so heinous, that while you can have convicted serial murderers be portrayed in a forgiving light via media, I've never heard of a single male rapist character being considered anything less than supremely evil. It's actually a trope, and has been for decades--if not centuries outright--that if you want to portray a villain as being beyond salvation, that you simply have them rape a woman or a child. In law, it ranks among some of the worst of the indictable (severe) offenses. It should speak volumes that the one type of crime that got its own TV spin-off from Law and Order was all about sexual violence, and that it opens with "
In the Criminal Justice System, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous..." Child Pedophiles rank among the highest prisoner-to-prisoner mortality rate in prisons. Even other prisoners who have committed horrible crimes tend to think lowly of rapists.
That "1 in 4" figure has no logical, citationable source, and the number changes on an arbitrary basis.
The Criminal Justice System has already done a report on this, it's one of the rarest crimes to appear. Even if you account for the fact that only about 20% of people report the crime, and then assume that every single report of the crime is accurate and not a vindictive lie, the rate becomes about 3%.
That's still nowhere near 25%.
Speaking of vindictive lies, another piece of vile stupidity that needs to go away: That we should always believe in the victim.
I'm not sure people understand what a "victim" is in the eyes of the judicial system. The victim can be either the accused
or the accuser: A person accused of rape can have their entire career destroyed and their personal reputation tarnished beyond repair. Therefore, the entire process of gathering information, asking questions, interrogating both parties, et cetera? That's part of the process of determining who the victim is. So when idiots screech "believe the victim", that's exactly what the justice system is doing. It's just trying to figure out
who the victim is first, so as to avoid another bout of the Salem Witch Trials.
And I can actually say this with some certainty, because for the career I'm getting into in the near future, I actually do have to understand some measure of criminal law. Not a lot of it, but some.
Fashion is not an indicator of rape culture. It's silly to even bring that up. If you want to bring up gendered clothing, that's a fine topic of discussion (because WHY THE FUCK DO WOMEN'S PANTS NOT HAVE POCKETS THIS IS FUCKING STUPID POCKETS ARE THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD RARRFEAWEFAWEFJAWIEFOJAWEFAIWEFOJ~) but it really has nothing to do with rape culture.
If you want an example of rape culture, it exists in the middle east right now and it's enslaving thousands of women to be breeding fuck toys for ISIL, and/or murdering them for trying to get an education. If you sincerely believe in a rape culture that exists in the west, I urge you to look at the middle east and ask yourself that question again. Because in order to believe in the "1 in 4" figure, you first have to believe that we can rape millions of people (mostly women) and then somehow cover that up, when thousands of women being raped on the other side of the world is an immediately noticeable and terrifying phenomena.
Is it fair that women are more likely to be raped than men? No. Is it fair that men are six times more likely to suffer assaults, have jail times 40% longer than their female counterparts for equal crimes, and account for over 90% of workplace fatalities? No. Is life fair? No. You're born with a set of circumstances you have to live with, because life goes on in complete indifference, no matter how much you may hate it. Is it worth addressing and trying to improve? Yes. Is it worth doing so by spreading fear mongering, bullshit statistics, and abandoning core principles of the judicial system like "innocent before proven guilty?" No.
If you can't understand why, then I envy your ignorance of history, and the millions who died over hundreds of years to buy you a society in which you could have the choice to profess a lack of belief in the system.
