Where are all the rapists?

(Trigger warning: rape.)

one.
We're all incredibly familiar with the statistic that one in four women are raped in their life. It's become almost a platitude, a totem like the comparisons of defence and aid spending, something traded as meaningful by even the most abhorrent moralities. It's a shocking, horrible number that men frequently like to demonstrate their new masculinity with.

But who is actually doing this? If one in four women are raped, a truly phenomenal number of men must be rapists, perhaps even an equal number - one in four. So where are they? Who are they? Why are we so comfortable to see women as victims but never men as aggressors?

In recited truths, rapists, like racists, belong to a tiny group of marginal men that apparently have no echoes or similarities with the rest of the world - a hermetically sealed environment of evil men. So it is with the EDL, so it must be with rapists, in this received wisdom.

So where are these rapists? Some, we must presume, reside in jail, and we 'know' they are rapists because even the law agrees. Certainly the law is so reluctant to convict that we can be pretty certain of these men. But day-to-day, where are they? Accusations against friends and acquaintances often catastrophically backfire on the victim, with the arrayed firepower of a patriarchal class rushing to the aggressor's defence and bullying the victim. It is certainly time we started being upfront about the rapists, who are absolutely, certainly, in our midst. It will remain incredibly hard for victims to speak up without a dramatic change in society, although that is one of the greatest goals we must strive for - but one thing we can do tomorrow, do to everyone, is talk about the fact that even if we don't know who they are, there are far more rapists than we are comfortable admitting. It's not a pleasant subject, but since we're apparently so comfortable talking about women being raped, exchanging that for talk of men being rapists might be a powerful step forward.


two.
But there is one more place where whites are very comfortable imagining rapists, and that is when it is black men. The racist stereotype of black men as animalistic, brutish, cruel and powerful, opposed to black women as helpless, childlike passives is probably the most pernicious of all and its roots in the slave trade have been well documented. This goes far beyond Starkey blaming (misattributed) national characteristics for child sexual abuse, because it is not just attributing the motivation to race, but implying that all black men are potential aggressors. When we see black men called out for sexual abuse and not white men, what is on display is not feminism but racism. Feminism would be a concern for every victim and contempt for every aggressor, but a focus on just black perpetrators is using what has been dubbed 'imperial feminism', that of using a pseudo-feminism to further racist goals.

Take, for example, the furore around Chris Brown. It is obvious that what it is documented Chris Brown did is abhorrent in the extreme, an awful, horrifying and utterly unjustifiable attack. Nothing I want to say in any way excuses what he has done. But the way it has been responded to has been a playing out of exactly what I describe. Chris Brown has been condemned across the board, and been at the centre of the biggest moral panic in modern pop music. So far so good. But then the condemnation started to leak across to Rihanna. Why did she lift the restraining order? Why did she collaborate with him? Why did she resume a relationship with him? Won't she remember she's a role model? Rihanna was presented as an idiotic, slavish child in thrall to him and unable to tear herself away. Understanding just how limited the options available to women in abusive scenarios is vitally important, but in fact her agency - for want of a better word - was not presented as limited at all. Instead, she was criticised for using her 'agency' wrongly, for lifting the restraining order, for collaborating and then for getting back with him.


Chris Brown has come under attacks vastly out of proportion to white aggressors. I don't want him to have an easier life - I just want every white abuser to suffer the same. Do we picket Sean Penn films? Christian Slater films? How about Eminem? David Hasselhof is thought of as a 'comedy' figure. Roman Polanski continues to evade jail for child sexual abuse. Michael Fassbender. Mel Gibson. Axl Rose. Gary Oldman. Sean Bean. Bill Murray. John Lennon. I could go on.
My point is that the focus on Chris Brown is not, in most cases, motivated by feminism, but instead is fit into an easy, lazy stereotype of abusive black men. Every white 'feminist' can attack Brown, because he can safely be pigeonholed as an aggressor, in exactly the way that white men, as discussed in part one, cannot be. Even if it could be honestly said to be feminism, it is at the least a racist feminism, one focussed on black abusers to a far greater extent than white ones, and a feminism that leaves women of colour alienated without a side to join - abusers on one hand, racism on the other. Let's, as I pleaded in part one, start talking about the white rapists and abusers in our midst.