white women, for Black women in particular and women of color in general, unpunished sexual violence was and remains a constant threat. Despite the narratives espoused by lynching advocates, white women were not the ones who were most at risk from sexual violence. Black women were expected to adhere to every aspect of respectability pushed on them by Jim Crow laws as well as by community norms established in the wake of slavery. However, it didn’t really matter how Black women and girls dressed or behaved, because white men could and often did assault them for sport.
Unlike white women, Black women had not even the thin veneer of legal protection on their side. It wasn’t until Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old Black mother and sharecropper, was attacked in Abbeville, Alabama, on September 3, 1944, by six white men that the possibility of legal recourse for such crimes even entered the national discourse. The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor was formed by Rosa Parks and several other civil rights leaders of the time to attempt to get some measure of justice for Mrs. Taylor. The crime, which garnered extensive coverage in the Black press, never saw the indictment of the accused, but it did help pave the way for women of color to be able to turn to the law for help.
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FROM ROSA PARKS and the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor to Korean feminists pushing for the Japanese government to pay reparations for victims of the wartime practice of “comfort women,” women of color have always organized to combat sexual violence. More recently groups like Incite! and the Human Rights Project for Girls have highlighted the reality that sexual abuse is a key factor in young women of color ending up in the school-to-prison pipeline. When the work centers on the most marginalized targets of sexual harassment and abuse, it benefits not only their communities, but all communities.
Although there was no real justice for Recy Taylor, we can look at the Daniel Holtzclaw verdict in Oklahoma and see the impact of a history of organizing: Holtzclaw, a former police officer, was convicted of sexually assaulting twelve Black women and sentenced to 263 years in prison after organizers brought media attention to his case, and the police department actually held him accountable instead of trying to minimize or conceal his crimes. It’s not enough to focus on the most visible victims; we must use every opportunity to challenge rape culture at all levels. We must challenge violence from not only those we think of as rapists but also those who administer this system that privileges rapists over their victims, and that normalizes the harassment and abuse of the most vulnerable.
In any given week you can find articles from mainstream, ostensibly feminist sites that turn rape prevention into a circle jerk of not quite victim blaming. They’re filled with tips about how to fight a stranger, what not to wear or drink, and where not to go. Emily Yoffe’s 2013 Slate piece “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” pushed for a dry campus life for women so they could avoid being sexually assaulted. Sometimes these articles even advocate for forcing victims to testify against their will, as illustrated in Amanda Marcotte’s 2014 Slate piece “Prosecutors Arrest Alleged Rape Victim to Make Her Cooperate in Their Case. They Made the Right Call.” Though these pieces are generally well meaning, they ultimately frame rape as something that a potential victim can prevent if they learn the steps of this peculiar dance that is trying to avoid being possibly assaulted, the immediate response is often one of several questions ranging from “What were you wearing?” to “Why were you there?” to “Had you been drinking?” The answers to those questions can never be relevant—ultimately victims are assaulted because someone chose to attack them.
Instead of tips on how to not be a rapist, how to teach people not to rape, or even on creating therapeutic outlets for potential rapists, we find a half dozen tips on preventing a mythical stranger from raping an able-bodied, alert, physically fit person with excellent reflexes and an exceptional amount of luck.
These tips never address disability, differences in fight-or-flight (or freeze) adrenaline responses, or even the reality that most assailants are known to their victims. Often, the articles are dissected and derided by