RAPE IS A CULTURE- A

Need for Change

• B. L. Himabindu, Radhika Arora & N. S. Prashanth (2014) Whose problem is it anyway? Crimes against women in India, Global Health
Action, 7:1, DOI: 10.3402/gha.v7.23718- Although the legal response is a useful deterrent against such heinous crimes, women continue to suffer due to deeply
rooted social prejudices that make them vulnerable to violence and discrimination in society.

• Datta, Anindita. “The Genderscapes of Hate: On Violence against Women in India.” Dialogues in Human Geography 6, no. 2 (July 2016): 178–81.
doi:10.1177/2043820616655016.- While extraordinary incidents generate debate, the ordinary and implicit everyday violence that underpin these are glossed over
despite the dialectical relations between the two.

• Ferrão, M., & Gonçalves, G. (2019). Rape crimes reviewed: The role of observer variables in female victim blaming. Retrieved 3 September 2019, from
http://dx.doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.1965- The stranger rape is closely associated with the stereotypical rape, and is among the most feared of all crimes.

• Ravinder Barn, Ved Kumari, Understanding Complainant Credibility in Rape Appeals: A Case Study of High Court Judgments and Judges’ Perspectives in India, The
British Journal of Criminology, Volume 55, Issue 3, May 2015, Pages 435–453, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azu112- Despite the growing number of reported cases of
rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in
general and the judiciary in particular.

• Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2015) Scene of the Crime, Feminist Media Studies, 15:2, 175-191, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2014.930061- This analysis found that the
American news media invoked archetypes of the Third World as a primitive and undisciplined place populated by savage males and subordinate women, a space in
which women's mobility is constrained and where state authority is complicit in rendering women vulnerable to sexual assault due to its incompetence.
 REFERENCES for RAPE

• HOLMSTROM, L. (2017). VICTIM OF RAPE: ROUTLEDGE.-From the point of view of institutional response to rape, there is no chance for the rape to be
investigated or the rapist convicted if the rape remains unreported.
• Baker, K. K. (2015). Why rape should not (always) be crime. Minnesota Law Review, 100(1), 221-280. Traditional rape law reflected a social norm that
validated men’s entitlement to sex and allowed men to consistently ignore and override women’s will.
• Kaplan, M. (2017). Rape beyond crime. Duke Law Journal, 66(5), 1045-1112. his Article argues that, without broader cultural changes, criminal law faces a
double bind: rape laws will either be ineffective or neglect the importance of individual culpability.
• Wong, J. S., & Balemba, S. (2018). The Effect of Victim Resistance on Rape Completion: A Meta-Analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 19(3), 352–
365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838016663934-women who resist their attacker are significantly more likely than non -resisters to avoid rape completion.
This finding held across analyses for physical resistance, verbal resistance, or resistance of any kind.
• MacKinnon, C. A. (2016). Rape redefined. Harvard Law Policy Review, 10(2), 431-478. Rape is redefined in gender equality terms by eliminating consent,
an intrinsi- cally unequal concept, and reconceiving force to include inequalities.
 REFERENCES for VICTIM BLAMING

• Pinciotti, C. M., & Orcutt, H. K. (2019). It Won’t Happen to Me: An Examination of the Effectiveness of Defensive Attribution in Rape Victim
Blaming. Violence Against Women. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219853367-Defensive attribution posits that victim blame results from one’s
underlying perception of vulnerability. The resulting blame is believed to reduce perceived similarity to the victim and vulnerability to
victimization, though extant research has neglected to examine its effectiveness in men and women.
• Ferrão, M., & Gonçalves, G. (2019). Rape crimes reviewed: The role of observer variables in female victim blaming. Retrieved 3 September 2019,
from http://dx.doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.1965 -Findings further indicate that higher scores on sexist ideologies and rape myth acceptance
predict higher victim blame, and that higher rape empathy scores predict lower victim blame.
• Felson, R. B., & Palmore, C. (2018). Biases in blaming victims of rape and other crime. Psychology of Violence, 8(3), 390-
399.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/vio0000168 Gender biases can lead to greater victim blaming for rape and female victims.
• Sprankle, E., Bloomquist, K., Butcher, C., Gleason, N., & Schaefer, Z. (2017). The Role of Sex Work Stigma in Victim Blaming and Empathy of
Sexual Assault Survivors. Sexuality Research And Social Policy, 15(3), 242-248. doi: 10.1007/s13178-017-0282-sex workers have reported a history
of stigma associated with their identity and labor, which has resulted in numerous barriers to justice, social services, and healthcare.
• Van der Bruggen, M., & Grubb, A. (2014). A review of the literature relating to rape victim blaming: An analysis of the impact of observer and
victim characteristics on attribution of blame in rape cases. Aggression And Violent Behavior, 19(5), 523-531. -Some police officers do hold
problematic attitudes about rape victims e.g., blame, rape myth acceptance, although they are frequently doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2014.07.008 noted to be
at a low level. Furthermore, characteristics of the victim, e.g., alcohol intoxication and emotional expression, can affect attributions of victim
credibility.
 REFERENCES for VICTIM BLAMING

• Sophie Sills, Chelsea Pickens, Karishma Beach, Lloyd Jones, Octavia Calder-Dawe, Paulette Benton-Greig & Nicola Gavey (2016) Rape culture and social media:
young critics and a feminist counter public, Feminist Media Studies, 16:6, 935-951, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2015.1137962-Social media sites, according to Carrie
A. Rentschler, can become both “aggregators of online misogyny” as well as key spaces for feminist education and activism. They are spaces where “rape culture,”
in particular, is both performed and resisted, and where a feminist counter public can be formed (Michael Salter 2013Salter, Michael. 2013.

• Suarez, E., & Gadalla, T. M. (2010). Stop Blaming the Victim: A Meta-Analysis on Rape Myths. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(11), 2010–
2035. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260509354503Rape myths—false beliefs used mainly to shift the blame of rape from perpetrators to victims—are also prevalent
in today’s society and in many ways contribute toward the pervasiveness of rape.
• Layman, M. J., Gidycz, C. A., & Lynn, S. J. (1996). Unacknowledged versus acknowledged rape victims: Situational factors and posttraumatic stress. Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, 105(1), 124-131.-Investigators of sexual assault have found that a substantial number of women who have been raped do not conceptualize
their experiences as such.
• Pandey, R. (1986). Rape crimes and victimization of rape victim in free India. Indian Journal of Social Work, 47(2), 169-186.-Society and the judicial system
continue to have a negative attitude toward the rape victim; a rape-prone cultural configuration has evolved in India through the processes of maintaining the status
of women as inferior to that of men.

• Suresh Kanekar & Maharukh B. Kolsawalla (1980) Responsibility of a Rape Victim in Relation to her Respectability, Attractiveness, and Provocativeness, The
Journal of Social Psychology, 112:1, 153-154, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1980.9924310- In the studies of attribution of responsibility of a rape victim for her own
rape, the sexual provocativeness of the victim has hardly been used as an independent variable possibly because of its transparent importance .
Social prejudice is a major cause of rape being unreported . It has become a part of our culture to
the extent that unless the event is extraordinary , it goes unnoticed. Media depicts the society as
deplorable and flawed which is justifiable. Judicial decisions are ineffective as Rape is not an
individual act but the action of a collective. Gender biases, social stigma, attitude of authorities
lead to victim blaming .The victim is often held responsible for the crime because of the negative
attitude and false beliefs that persist in the society.

SUMMARY
 Social prejudice and ignorance of people
are the biggest reasons for rape. Victim
blaming is the result of an under
MY developed society. It is not just the law
that is flawed or their lack of proper
ARGUMENT implementation, but the society in
general that is responsible for this
menace.