Finding A Middle Ground

Reading “Feminist Theories of Rape” was particularly challenging for me this week. For my CSL project, I am continuing on with my role as a volunteer intake support worker at the Sexual Assault Centre here at the university. Part of my role at SAC is to provide a walk-in counseling service; one of the main parts of working with clients is alleviating self-blame that is so pervasive in sexual assault cases, due to the ‘myths’ that are passed around. One of the main points that we bring up with clients, which Brownmiller also uses, is to explore the idea that rape is about power and domination. I found it helpful to talk to clients about this, as many who come in feel responsible for their attack because they felt that they were too flirty, dressed too provocatively, etc. Explaining the attack from a power standpoint truly seemed to alleviate the blame clients feel; the fact that it doesn’t matter what we wear, how we act, or where we are walking – we are not ‘asking for it.’ The purpose of my role as a support worker is to empower people who have experienced sexual assault; by removing the ‘attractiveness’ factor from the repertoire of self-blame, survivors did not have to carry around the responsibility of eliciting an attack.

Once I started thinking about the critique of this argument, I started to feel uneasy about condoning sexual assault as an act of power. Taking away a survivor’s agency, rendering him/her as a helpless victim, is the opposite of what I thought I was doing. Cahill suggests that understanding sexual assault as a tool of power leaves women as powerless, and unable to fill a participatory role in the gender struggle Brownmiller suggests is happening. Further, accepting that the societal structures and institutions promote and sustain sexual assault and threats of sexual assault, do not allow women space within social and political structures and leaves women in a constant state of victimization. Not only leaving men out of the possibility of being a survivor of sexual assault (which, as a supporter absolutely happens), it doesn’t allow women to take control of their lives and be powerful agents of change. If women are constant passive victims, if we are rapable because of our biology, there is no ability for us to achieve change.

In counseling individuals who have experienced a sexual assault, after a perpetrator has forcibly taken away control from the survivor, I feel it is incredibly important to empower the survivor so they feel they can or have regained control. Cahill’s critique of Brownmiller’s argument definitely made me take a step back and look at the implications of how I am explaining the nature of sexual assault, and I am hoping that somehow I will be able to find a middle ground, or another way to alleviate self-blame without leaving the survivor as a passive victim.