By LYNNE MARIE WANAMAKER

EASTHAMPTON — The other day, I asked a room full of teen self-defense students, “If someone chooses to assault you, whose fault is that?”

It was the giggliest of the bunch who answered solemnly, “His fault.”
I concurred. “And if you were somewhere you shouldn’t be, hanging out with a bad crowd, wearing the wrong shoes, and someone chose to assault you? Then whose fault is it?”

Her face clouded. “His fault?” she said with less certainty.

In her opinion piece published Feb. 28, Massachusetts Daily Collegian columnist Yevgeniya Lomakina stumbled on the same question — and, unlike my young student, did not come up with the right answer.

Lomakina wrote, “If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party, then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall. She made a decision to dress a certain way, to consume alcohol and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. Far from being a victim of rape, she is a victim of her own choices.”

It’s tempting to see Lomakina’s stunning misogyny — like her factual inaccuracies — as a reflection of her own (and her editor’s) journalistic inexperience. The newspaper later apologized for running the essay.

But then on March 8, New York Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. found it relevant when reporting on the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men and boys to include these observations: “Residents in the neighborhood where (the assault occurred) said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months.

They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“‘Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?’ said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record.”

These reporters give voice to the persistent belief that someone other than the attackers — the victims or, should they be minor children, their mothers — are to blame for sexual assault.

It can be difficult to hold onto two apparently paradoxical truths.

First, that women and parents can increase their own and their children’s safety by employing self-protection skills. Second, that the ultimate responsibility for sexual assault always falls unambiguously on the assailant.

Among the teens in my program, it was the oldest, boldest girl who called me out on this apparent contradiction.

“Why isn’t it your fault?” she challenged. “If you make bad choices, if you take risks you shouldn’t take, why isn’t it your fault if you get hurt?”

I offered a metaphor.

“What is the difference between leaving your car unlocked and not having it stolen, and leaving your car unlocked and having it stolen?”

“The difference is a thief. The difference is some person — not you — who chose to steal your car.”

I teach self-defense because I want girls and women to have every tool imaginable to keep themselves safe. Many of these tools are skills of judgment, intuition and decision making. Often, we keep ourselves safe by assessing the risk of a situation and taking action to reduce our exposure to that risk.

But we should be able to be at our most vulnerable and not be subject to someone else’s choice to take advantage of that vulnerability.

We should be able to underdress and overdrink without risking anything worse than a cold and a hangover. We should be able to be 11 years old. Whether or not we are hanging out with older boys, whether or not our mother is watching us.

There is a reason we persist in blaming the victims of sexual assault, even when the victims are ourselves. If we can assign a reason for why the attack occurred — she was in the wrong place, her mother wasn’t supervising her, she flirted too much — we can promise ourselves that, because we’ll never engage in that behavior, we’ll always be safe.

One in six American women will experience a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. That’s not because one sixth of American women go to the wrong neighborhood or dress provocatively. It’s not because they drink too much or flirt too much or because their self-defense failed them.
One in six American women experience sexual assault because there are a lot of rapists out there. It is up to all of us to stop giving them quarter.

The first step is to stop justifying their crime by blaming their victims.

Lynne Marie Wanamaker is a National Women’s Martial Arts Certified Self Defense Instructor. She blogs about the intersection of self defense and parenting.