An ideal society would be one full of law-abiding humans who cared about each other’s feelings and displayed compassion, rationality, and didn’t use PMDs. Unfortunately, society’s full of people who pull their pants down in front of other people instead.
When something like that happens – when we feel hurt or violated – we need someone we can turn to, someone who’ll punish the ones who have hurt us.
Like the police.
One Singaporean woman found one particular officer to be unempathetic to her plight, however, after she was allegedly blamed for her own sexual assault.
Victim blamed
The woman detailed her awful experience at the police station in a Twitter post on Saturday (2 Nov).
She writes that she went to the police station to make a report on sexual harassment. However, the “first thing” the police officer allegedly said in response was that she “shouldn’t even be at a bar”.
I’m sorry, what?
If that wasn’t bad enough, the officer allegedly lectured her about “dressing properly so as to not tempt men”.
I have so many questions for this officer, the first and most important of which is:
One of the woman’s friends responded to her same post on an Instagram story, claiming that she was once victim-blamed too:
Here is the woman’s original Twitter post:
lol when i went to the police station to report sexual harassment the first thing the officer said was “you shouldn’t even be at a bar” and then proceeded to lecture me about dressing properly so as to not tempt men. absolute T R A S H they literally let anyone join the SPF hey
— ash (@carb_baby) November 2, 2019
The problem with these officers’ alleged attitudes is that it’s not uncommon. According to a survey conducted by Aware, 1 in 10 respondents think women who are raped are often “asking for it.” Moreover, 40.0% of respondents aged 18-39 and over 50.0% of respondents aged 40 and above agree that women who wear provocative clothing are “asking for it” and should bear responsibility for harassment.
Yes, some people believe women should bear responsibility for their own sexual harassment.
Anyone who’s thought about this for more than five seconds would see that it makes no sense. If there’s a serial killer out there who murdered men with centre partings, should we blame the centre-parted victims for combing their hair in that manner, or should we criminalize the sociopathic men who killed them?
Facebook user Alice has an even more convincing analogy:
SPF response
The Singapore Police Force responded the next day in a Twitter post of their own.
They urged the woman to provide more information on her alleged victim-blaming incident.
They also said that they take a “very serious view” of all complaints made against their officers and that such complaints will be thoroughly investigated.
Here is their tweet:
The Police take a very serious view of all complaints made against our officers. Such complaints will be throughly investigated. We would like to request for you to provide more information on the incident via https://t.co/3tm9a3emHJ so we can look into the matter.
— SingaporePoliceForce (@SingaporePolice) November 3, 2019
It is unclear if the woman has made an official complaint as of yet. If you’re one of those who subscribes to the view that women should bear responsibility for their own sexual harassment, I invite you to think about it more critically and be more empathetic.
Blaming a woman for wearing a certain piece of clothing after she gets raped or molested just doesn’t make sense to me, and it shouldn’t make sense to you, either.
