This is a nice read for some of y'all.
Rape myth #6: Rapists are monsters.
Rapists are not monsters. Rapists are people that have done something wrong. Through sexual predator labels and lists we vilify rapists and perpetrators of sexual violence. People want clear categories for the type of person that would do something so horrible and want that category to be clearly different and separate from mainstream society. But, as explained above, most of the perpetrators of sexual violence are people that we know. They are us. The perpetrators of sexual violence are not imagined, crazy perverts, but rather our neighbors, family members, football coaches and religious leaders. To prevent sexual violence we need to honestly confront who is committing these atrocities. To adequately deal with the reality of who is committing these crimes, we need a more complicated approach towards perpetrators that integrates the violence of their acts with the reality of their humanity.
The myth of rapists as monsters gives us a false sense of security. If child molesters are strange, anonymous men driving white vans, then by successfully avoiding strange white vans, we can successfully avoid sexual abuse. But children who are sexually abused are more likely to be abused by a family member than by a stranger. How can we teach our children to avoid sexually abusive parents and uncles? Actually preventing sexual violence is messier and more difficult than our culture has accepted. We perpetuate these myths about rapists to avoid that messy and complicated process.
If only monsters perpetrate sexual violence, what happens when a woman is raped by her husband, who she loves, and who is not a monster? What do you do when you coach does something sexually inappropriate? Or if you think you saw your neighbor touch a child, but you could not imagine her to be that type of person? Vilifying perpetrators silences victims. Because most victims and witnesses intimately know the abuser or rapist, and because the label of abuser or rapist is so extreme, people struggle to speak up about sexual violence. We don't want to label people we know as monsters, even though they've committed monstrous acts. To adequately support the victims abused, raped and molested by the people they know and love, we need a more complicated approach towards perpetrators that integrates the violence of their acts with the reality of their humanity.
The hindering effect of vilifying rapists is that it stops the conversation at “rape is wrong”. If we are ever going to prevent rape we need a conversation that goes beyond “rape is wrong and done by bad people”. Categorizing rapists as awful people and separate from us puts a neat ribbon on the whole rape discussion bundle so that we can collectively avoid the more uncomfortable topic. The more uncomfortable topic being: What in our culture and what in ourselves creates this epidemic of sex as violence