Kitty
I was watching a YouTube video entitled Top 15 Abuse Public Service Announcements recently, & felt as though a couple of them implicitly victim-blamed. One featured a man going up to a bar & chatting up a woman, & the voiceover woman said that we’ve just seen a rapist in action, then we see the man approaching the woman again & dropping a pill in her drink while he’s talking to her. The moral of that story is, apparently, ‘watch your drink’. Um, instead of telling women to watch their drinks, why not tell men not to approach random women in bars, drop pills in their drinks & take them off somewhere & rape them?! And there was another one about dodgy cabs in London, where there’s a male driver talking to camera about how he’s been in trouble with the law as he’s driving along, & says that having sexual assault convictions doesn’t stop him picking up women in his cab (or words to that effect), before stopping & picking a woman up. At the end, there is writing on the screen saying “know what you’re getting into?” & adjures women to get a black cab, a night bus or ring a number to find their local minicab office. Instead of doing that, why not do more to stop unlicensed minicab drivers plying their trade, & tell dodgy cab drivers not to pick up women with the intention of sexually assaulting them?! Although whether they’d listen is debatable. To be fair, there was an anti-rape one created by the Welsh Government, entitled ‘Stop Blaming The Victim’, where we see a man & a woman on a night out together (they met in a club), & the story of what happened that evening is told from both their points of view. Predictably, the man makes excuses for his behaviour- what the woman was wearing, the fact that she asked him to walk her home & invited him in, the fact that she’d had several shots in the club, etc., etc. (i.e. the usual victim-blaming twaddle that rapists come out with to justify their actions)- & saw nothing wrong with what he’d done because he thought that she was ‘asking for it’ on the aforementioned grounds, while the woman was shocked & upset about what had happened, & never thought it would go that far, or words to that effect. This ad obviously did NOT blame the victim, on the grounds that the general message in it was that we need to STOP doing that (agree!)! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33oiJm_cK8