Finally, thank you to my family for their unwavering support.
Introduction .
"People who think that women are partly responsible for rape, are themselves responsible for abetting rapes. They are looking for a reason to avoid punishing rapists. And there by [sic] mak[e] it safer for rapists to commit such crimes." "Victim blaming is incredibly complicated.I do not know what the fine line is between victim blaming and helping women help themselves against patriarchal violence of all kinds. All I know is that we all must resist, combat victimhood, [help] victims, educate others, and help people help themselves "without condoning behavior but without judgment and blame.".
A particular narrative about the harms of rape and the agency of perpetrators and victims pervades Uberal and radical feminist approaches to rape. This paradigm, which I call the victim/perpetrator framework, incorporates several key assumptions: first, that the rape perpetrator acts freely and deliberately to harm; second, that the rape victim is passive and in no way participates in or contributes to the actions of the perpetrator; and, third, that in every rape, the harm is always traumatizing and directed exclusively from the perpetrator to the victim.".
Within this victim/perpetrator framework, the roles of rape victims and perpetrators are simultaneously relational and fixed. Each must be present for an act to be recognized as rape. If one party is really a rape victim, then the other party must be a perpetrator. At the same time, if a party is not recognizable as a perpetrator because he or she fails to conform to the behavior and motivations expected of that role, then there is no recognizable rape. This fixed relationship between perpetrator and victim, which stems from the positivist assumption that a single tmth is possible and identifiable, is hostile to the notion that multiple and contradictory truths may exist within a single interaction.
