I recently started tumbl-ing (I think that should be the term) and ran across a very disturbing story making the rounds:
This message is for every girl who goes to work, school, or home alone.
If you find a child crying on the road showing his/her address & asking you to take him/her to that address, immediately take that child to the police station and ABSOLUTELY NOT to the address.
This is a new way to gang rape girls.
Please reblog this message in order to help make girls aware of this sick & twisted method of tricking girls into getting raped.
Dont be shy to reblog this message, as this 1 message can save the lives of many girls.
This makes a lot of sense. Always remember this!
Now, don't get me wrong, nothing I am about to say is intended as any sort of criticism of anyone who re-blogged this message, but instead of the larger culture we live in. I almost re-blogged it myself, because if true it is absolutely the sort of thing people should know about. However, my mom was pretty obsessed with urban legends and folklore growing up (that is the study of them, as an anthropologist) and this had the familiar whiff of legend: the lack of specificity (really, this is happening everywhere, cause it seems like there should be some geographic boundaries or at least specific gangs), the extreme luridness, and the fact that it isn't in the news or an episode of Law & Order.
It sure enough is false, but being a board-certified over-educated angry feminist, I couldn't leave it at that. I have to wonder why these things get started and perpetuated so uncritically, why don't we look harder at such a wild claim?
If you'll indulge a little armchair sociology, I think, relative to the true statistics and fact on rape, these myths are weirdly comforting. These weird tales of gang rapists using children to lure women conform to our cultural beliefs about rape: rapes are committed by strangers, are always violent, and occur in strange environments. It pushes to the side the fact that actually
2/3 of all rapes are committed by acquaintances (93% if the victim is a minor) and 50% occur within a mile of the victim's home. It lets one believe that rape is an elaborate, exotic crime, not something so horrifyingly mundane that it will happen to
1 in 6 women in America. So at first this crazy story about child-baited gang rape sounds horrifyingly scary, but actually it is so much less scary than the truth that it bobs and weaves away from. I worry that these comforting lies convince women that how they protect themselves from rape is by doing x,y, and z, which shifts blame both from the rapist (who holds 100% of the blame no matter what), and rape culture; out of activism and education and into taking precautions against imagined threats.
It kind of reminds me of Freudian psychology. When Freud first began interviewing crazy ladies from well-respected middle-class Viennese families he began learning that many of them reported childhood sexual abuse, usually by a close relative. His colleagues pointed out that these were nice middle-class families these girls came from, so obviously such things were impossible, and anyway he'd be run out of town for reporting that. Obviously something else must be going on. Freud's whole elaborate (now massively discredited) theories of psycho-sexual development are the result of grasping for any way to explain why girls from nice families had memories (and the attendant psychological trauma) of sexual abuse committed by respected members of the community.
The point is we will believe a lot of really elaborate, weird shit to avoid mundane horror. Here's a final statistic for you, actual activism and education campaigns based around awareness of real sexual violence statistics have decreased the incidence of
sexual assault by 60% since 1993. That's huge, and awesome, and in no way furthered by promulgating falsehoods.
PS: I know this blog isn't usually so heavy. I'm a generally cheerful person, but occasionally feel the need to treat serious things with seriousness. If you would like,
Kitteh Roulette is pretty much the ultimate in Unicorn Chasers.
