Karen Hallion Illustration

nyconversation:

Just under a year ago, a girl was walking home along a deserted Melbourne street on a chilly spring evening. Her name was Jill Meagher. The details of what happened next will be all too familiar to anyone who’s read the news in Australia over the last year, but if you’re not from Australia, she was unlucky enough to encounter a man by the name of Adrian Ernest Bayley.

Bayley had a string of convictions for sexual assault and rape, and was on parole at the time he encountered Meagher. He raped her in a back alley and afterward, when she threatened to call the police, he killed her.

“They should have the death penalty for people like me,” Bayley told police when he was arrested. “How many chances does a person need? They should never have let me out.”

How many, indeed? Bayley just got sentenced to 35 years in prison; his tariff was reduced, apparently, because he was “remorseful.”

Meagher was unlucky, you might say. Unlucky to live in a world where a woman can’t walk home alone without the possibility that she might meet some murderous lunatic en route, unlucky to live in a society where this shit happens again and again and again.

Meagher’s husband Tom recently gave an interview to the ABC in Australia, wherein he railed against the fact that Bayley was ever on the streets to commit the crime in the first place. “He’s been let out, let off, too many times. He’s been let off by our justice system. He’s obviously a complete menace.”

So why was Bayley still on the streets? The most salient, depressing fact here is that most of his past crimes had been committed against prostitues. Specifically, he raped five prostitutes over a six-month period in 2000, a spree for which he was sentenced to eight whole years in jail. Eight years. It averages out as about 18 months a rape. And this for a man with two previous convictions for rape.

The message is all too disturbingly familiar: there’s rape and then there’s rape. If the victims were somehow seen to be putting themselves in harm’s way — if they were prostitues, or drunk, or wearing a short skirt, or whatever else — then the man can’t be held entirely responsible. If the victims of Bayley’s rape spree had been five rich women in a fancy suburb, he’d never have been on the streets to kill her. But he was. And he did.

“I’m still furious when I hear anyone say it,” said Tom Meagher of Bayley’s previous convictions, “Whenever I read it my blood boils. It sends a disturbing message.” 

He’s right. It does. And it was a message echoed this week by Serena Williams, of all people, in an interview with Rolling Stone — asked about the notorious Steubenville gang rape, she said, “Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you: Don’t take drinks from other people. She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously, I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.”

No, it’s not different. A girl can get as drunk as she damn well wants, in the reasonable expectation that a bunch of football players won’t rape her as she’s unconscious. Everything else is extraneous — whether or not the rapists “slipped her something,” whether or not she was “so drunk she doesn’t remember,” whether or not she “wasn’t a virgin.”

Williams went for the time-honored celebrity defence of claiming that she was misquoted: “What was written – what I supposedly said – is insensitive and hurtful, and I by no means would say or insinuate that she was at all to blame.” Rolling Stone, happily are standing by their story,

And let’s be clear: Williams is suggesting that the victim is to blame. That’s fucking well exactly what’s she’s doing. The victim wasn’t “lucky” that “something worse” didn’t happen, that she didn’t cross paths with another Adrian Ernest Bayley. She’s unlucky that she lives in a society where men do shit like this and get away with it all too often. 

It shouldn’t need saying in 2013, but let’s say it anyway: fuck this. Rape victims are not to blame, and the “pragmatic” argument that they should “minimize risk” by not getting drunk, or wearing short dresses, or, y’know, being female is bullshit of the highest order, grounded in assumptions that women are somehow to blame for their mere existence provoking men who can’t control their hormones and their urges to rape.

Men who really can’t control such urges are potential Adrian Ernest Bayleys and should be dealt with accordingly. Bayley should have never have been in a position to rape Jill Meagher, and the two assholes who raped the poor girl in Steubenville — well, they’re the lucky ones, beneficiaries of a justice system that has cut them a whole lot more slack than they deserve, with one perpetrator getting a year in juvenile detention and the other two years, sentences that average out at pretty much exactly what Adrian Bayley got for his 2000 rapes.

And the rest of us — people who believe that we should live in a society where no-one is to blame for someone else doing something terrible to them — well, we just look on in despair. This shit has to stop. But it never, ever does.

femfreq:

Thanks #XboxOne #E3 press conference for revealing to us exactly zero games featuring a female protagonist for the next generation.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq)

June 10, 2013

Above is a tweet I made this afternoon in reaction to the fact that none of the games presented at…

Disgusting and sad.