From “Anti-Rape Underwear” in India to Sexual Harassment in Australia: Social Complicity in “Rape Culture”
▻http://othersociologist.com/2013/04/29/culture-of-rape
The fact that the law, the police and the criminal justice system are failing to ensure women’s public safety does not mean that individual women should be put in the position to tackle rapists on their own. This is exactly how a culture of rape is perpetuated: women are left to deal with sexual harassment on their own.
[...] more than half of all women have experienced physical or sexual violence, primarily at the hands of close relatives and partners, including uncles, fathers, friends, and husbands. She also notes that 20 percent of murders in Australia being perpetrated by an intimate partner, with 4/5 of these homicides involving a man who kills his female partner.
Politoff argues that crimes involving strangers creates greater levels of social anxiety because domestic gender violence is perceived as a personal problem to be managed by individuals. This individual perspective on violence has societal ramifications: it means that people are less likely to report crimes involving people they know and it subsequently means that less people are prosecuted for these crimes. Moreover, people are less likely to categorise violence by a partner, family member or friend as a “crime” – we call this “abuse” – and so it largely remains a personal trouble to be managed behind closed doors, or through victim counselling, rather than through the criminal justice system.