against victim-blaming and rape culture: #standwithlanden at unc

Earlier this week the Onion rather notoriously tweeted a reference to a nine-year old girl as the c-word.  While they did at least delete the tweet and apologize, I do think that cultural mindset of devaluing women’s bodies reflects on two of the big stories of the last couple of days, in which such devaluation translated into actual victim-blaming and dismissing rape charges against women.

Yesterday it was revealed that a unit of the Met (UK Metropolitan Police Service of the Greater London area) set up specifically to investigate rape and sexual assault cases had actively discouraged women from reporting rape.  They did so by haranguing women in the preliminary  stages of investigation, tending to disbelieve their stories and attempting to convince victims to retract their claims of rape and sexual assault.  Hence numerous rape allegations were dismissed under circumstances that an independent commission referred to as “clearly inappropriate.”  It turns out that a primary motivation for such dismissal of serious criminal claims was to improve that police unit’s statistics for investigations leading to prosecution in order to claim (quite superficially) greater success to the public.

In the most shocking case, the police unit dismissed a woman’s claim that she was raped by her husband who had made further threats of violence; that man eventually killed their two children with a knife as an act of aggression against her.  The police recorded the original rape as “consensual sex” and never even conducted an interview with the man in question.  (Source: London Evening Standard).

Stand With Landen

Yesterday I came across another story involving dismissal of rape allegations that has recently gotten a fair amount of attention (although not nearly as much as it should have).  This one struck a bit of an internal chord with me because it occurred on the campus of my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (I did undergrad there).

The backdrop for this shares disturbingly similar overtones with the previous story: