Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. We know this, it's common knowledge.
But I've never seen anything telling us what to do with that information. You can easily google up signs of an abusive relationship if it's someone with whom you hve an actual relationship. There's all kinds of stuff about reducing your risk of being attacked by a stranger. But there's nothing about simple straightforward acquaintances.
Whoever's in charge of awareness stuff needs to come up with warning signs or something for acquaintances - people to whom you've been Properly Introduced but you don't actually know very well. A friend of a friend. A new co-worker. A relative's boyfriend. What signs should you look for to tell you you shouldn't accept a ride home from one of these people, and how do you do it politely?
I can't work out a good set of keywords to get me rape statistics for these kinds of relationships, but it has to be non-zero. Why is there no information about it?
4 comments:
I'm sorry to hear you didn't find anything on this. It's a frequent subject in women's anti-violence work (and sometimes a tad controversial).
In everything I've written about rape and safety, I also include ways to make yourself safer in date/acquaintance situations. Of course there's no real way to prevent rape altogether. Only potential rapists can do that. But I always include safety tips.
I'm surprised and upset that you weren't able to find good info online.
Should I be googling with different terminology? Because with the word acquaintance, I'm landing on so-called rape "myths" (so-called because it's nothing new to me) and I'm landing on stuff about date rape, but I'm specifically interested in the non-date, someone you met through respectable circumstances but don't actually know dynamic. A dating context is informed by the fact that you're free to evaluate them yourself, but in an acquaintance context there's the added dynamic that someone you trust knows them better than you do. Search results for the word acquaintance in this context seems to encompass everyone you've ever met, but can't think of a better term for what I'm trying to say.
(And for the paranoids reading this, it's purely theoretical resulting from something I read, there's no need to go around being suspicious of every man on the periphery of my social circle.)
Hmm... I don't know. I wasn't making a distinction between date and acquaintance situations. Now that I think of it, no one really does (that I know of). It's just stranger vs. not-stranger. And not-stranger includes dates and acquaintances. And acquaintances includes teachers, coaches, friends-of-friends, and so on.
So I guess you're right, there probably isn't any specific information on protecting yourself in this kind of dynamic. It's just: use your judgement - nothing is 100% safe - practice asserting yourself so you can say no to a situation that makes you uncomfortable. Same old stuff, easily said, not always easily done.
Yeah, the use your judgement and assert yourself is sometimes a completely different dance with a non-dating dynamic. If you use your own judgement on someone to whom you've been Properly Introduced, the person who Properly Introduced you might get mad at you for not trusting their judgement. It's not impossible or anything, but it's a different set of factors that we don't think about nearly as much as we think about possible scenarios with someone we're going out with.
I was just so surprised that to find nothing. I'm assuming the common wording is "someone the victim knows" as opposed to "someone the victim is going out with" for a reason.
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