News Mail reported on the trial of a woman who was accused of providing information to help a man who wanted to rob the hotel where she worked. During the robbery another man made the choice to rape a woman who also worked at the hotel.
The court will determine whether the woman provided the information to one of the men who committed the robbery and whether this means she is guilty of a crime. But the rape was not her fault, nothing she did could lead to rape. Rape is a choice made by a rapist.
Recent research in Australia identified “directly and indirectly shifting blame from male perpetrators of violence and assigning responsibility for violence to women by focusing on the behaviour of women and their role in the violence” as one of the key ways in which media fails to report men’s violence against women accurately. This is pretty much a text book example of what that research was talking about.
FixedIt is an ongoing project to push back against the media’s constant erasure of violent men and blaming of innocent victims. If you would like to help fund it – even $5 a month makes a big difference – please consider becoming a Patron
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