liens - GID

termination to carry through a sexual act as feeble protests are mistaken
for feminine modesty.
Rape victims do not seem to enjoy the unqualified sympathy of the
public. The societal attitude is one that suggests that the victim is the
architect of her plight, as she did not abide by the maternal warning at
menarche to be beware of men. An 18 year old who visits a male acquaintance
and remains with him till it is too late to get back home and
accepts the man’s invitation to spend the night with him ought to know
better, some would argue.
Culturally, it is assumed that even an interested girl who is not a prostitute
or sexually loose should play hard to get and should not readily say
‘yes’ to male advances. The problem here then is that a victim’s no
could potentially imply either yes or no. It becomes therefore unclear
to some men whether a girl’s no is NO or not. Consequently, a rapist
can argue, as some male respondents have, that his victim’s ‘mild’
protests are normal, nothing to worry about. Perhaps this also partly
accounts for male respondents’ reticence over rape encounters.
In the course of the study we came across accounts from females who
resisted physically and in the end frustrated a rapist’s attempts to rape
them. However, it seems that many of the girls in our sample who were
raped by community members gave up, and did not put up enough
fight. While a rapist who is a stranger might threaten to kill a victim
who puts up a fight, an acquaintance is unlikely to do this. It has to be
remarked however that in the media accounts of rape child victims are
told that if they disclosed the incident they would be killed. This however
works with children who have been defiled, rather than with adults.
Victims rarely report the crime and when they do the culprit is not punished
severely. This knowledge does not reassure victims; rapists on the
other hand are not deterred. What is more, victims reward rapists when
the former later fall for the rapist. This engenders cynical attitudes, such
as the perception that forced sexual intercourse with an uninterested
girl would change the feelings of the victim in favour of the rapist. The
extension of this logic is the practice where a girl impregnated by a rapist
is forcibly married to the rapist. 1
1
The logic seems to be that what you sow is what you reap. The connubial prospects
of an unmarried young mother are usually low, but rapists compelled to marry their
victim do not necessarily make good husbands.
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