Rape is a profound level of violation and it is basic human nature to not want people to know you have been violated. We as a society still have long way to go on how we treat people that are violated. In most cases we don't blame them but we do seem them as victims and weaker. Men who were raped as young boys are still often unwilling to admit what happened to them because of that even though everyone knows that they had no way to prevent it and did nothing to invite it. Incest is even worse and there we do have cases where both girls and boys endure years of abuse in part because of shame. There is still a tendency to see them as damaged goods and who wants to be seen as broken. Having strong successful people come forward and admit they were victims of abuse helps but it is still rare and I doubt it will ever change completely because at the core I think we are hard wired against it and it goes our natural reactions to social hierarchy.

I think the biggest place we are failing is when the victim made poor choices in the events that led up to the crime. An 18 year old girl who gets drunk with a bunch of people she hardly knows and makes out with another girl because all the guys were cheering her own in no way forfeits any rights to decide when and if she has sex with anyone and the perpetrators should get no leniency because of the way she was behaving. All that said she still practiced poor judgment and many people are going to hold her partially to blame because of that. We have to walk that fine line between not assigning blame to victims and still teaching people to be aware the risk they may be taking. It gets even murkier when the rape becomes less clear cut and the girl never says yes but never actually makes an effort to stop it either, by that definition President Kennedy is a rapist, or we the girl’s defense is she was really drunk and wouldn’t have done it if she had been sober. Where does the line begin?

It isn’t just sex crimes that treat that way either. Talk to someone about people falling for internet scams and the common response is to call the victim an idiot for getting fooled, hardly surprising that goes under reported. It doesn’t even have to poor decision making that leads to this, young men are likely to not report being assaulted because that don’t won’t to look so weak that they need the police to keep them from getting their ass kicks, looks a little too much like hiding under mom’s skirt. There is a point where we have to say to the victim your poor judgment needs to be taken into account.

So yes the west does have issues in how we treat crime victims but we are improving though I doubt the issue will ever go away. We still have huge strides to make especially in sex crimes. None of those things really compare to what we are seeing in some other parts of the world though. We don’t convict rape victims and fathers don’t kill their daughters to protect the family honor.