Last week, England’s National Health Service (NHS) came under fire because of a former sexual assault awareness campaign. With posters saying things like, “One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking,” many people found that the campaign blames victims and feeds into rape culture.

The campaign originally ran between 2005 and 2007 but NHS discontinued it because people had the same concerns then as they do now. According to dailymail.co.uk, problems have arisen again because posters and pamphlets featuring the troubling material are still readily available in England’s hospitals and clinics. Many people have taken to Twitter to voice their concerns and Oxford resident Jack May also started a Change.org petition, which already has over 107,000 signatures.

I could go on for days about the problematic aspects of this campaign: first is the fact that this campaign does not seem to acknowledge male victims, as if men can never be raped or assaulted. Although NHS was careful to use the word victims instead of women, these posters indicate that the only victims NHS is considering are women. Some posters depict women crying and in distress while lying on the ground while others say, “Would you get in [a car] with a man you’ve only just met?” An organization that calls itself the National Health Service should be serving everyone.

On top of all this, the main problem is that this is just a generally bad campaign; it does not even do a good job at serving the demographic it is trying to help. This campaign’s message is very clear: if you do not want someone to rape you, don’t drink too much. Messages like this make women responsible for preventing rape or assault. Once they fail at upholding these impossible responsibilities, shame and guilt ensue.

It is important to remember that victims will be seeing these messages too. Obviously, it is too late to prevent their assault, but they still matter. Though the organization intends them to be tips, these messages place the blame on victim. This does not encourage reporting a rape or even attempting to heal from such a traumatic situation.

NHS clearly had good intentions for this campaign, but the message it sends is not helping, only hurting. Telling girls to avoid drinking or walking home alone is not addressing the real problem, it’s just shaming the victims.

Preventative measures can have very positive effects, as long as it is enforced and reinforced that if these measures do not work and a victim is assaulted, it is not their fault. When we use fear and shame to try to prevent rape, the only people who are hurt are the ones we should be protecting and nurturing: victims.

If we want to tackle the problem of rape, we need to take two approaches. The first, of course, is informative and preventative actions such as self-defense classes, pepper spray and buddy systems for parties and social gatherings — though in a perfect world we wouldn’t need to take these measures. The second is to continue having discussions like this. We need to educate everyone, especially men who are statistically more likely to commit sexual assault, about the difference between sex and rape as well as bodily autonomy. We need to break down the stereotype that a rapist is a social outlier, hiding in dark shadows or that rape only occurs in “precarious” situations.

Mandisa Shields is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at meshield@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @mandisashields. 

 

Published on August 16, 2014 at 9:34 am