Picture this.
A woman sits in a court room, listening while a man who broke her arm and punched her face so hard the scars are permanent, is tried. The man is found guilty and sent to jail. The judge commends the woman, saying she showed great courage in coming to court and refusing to remain anonymous. In the days that followed, newspaper columnists salute her courage as well.
There’s something wrong with that, isn’t there? Why should the woman, the victim of this brutality, be considered ‘brave’? That she suffered at the hands of a troglodyte there is no doubt. But turning up in court is ‘courageous’? Why shouldn’t she turn up, if she feels like it?
Now picture this.
A woman who has been repeatedly raped by a neighbour turns up in court to see him tried. The man is found guilty and sent to jail. The judge declares him to be a cruel and shameless excuse for a human being. He also commends the woman for waiving her anonymity and appearing in the court to see her aggressor found guilty.
There’s something wrong with that scenario too. Why should a woman, the victim of this brutality, be considered ‘brave’? That she suffered at the hands of a troglodyte there is no doubt. But surely the criminal in all of this is the man, the woman is the victim.
Please don’t miss the point I’m making. It is that a victim of rape has no reason in the world to feel shame or embarrassment or any similar emotion. She is100% the victim and the excuse for a man in the dock is 100% the one who should feel shame.
No more than a woman with a broken arm and damaged face, a woman who has been raped must reject this stupid notion that she carries shame of some kind. That should be , that is the attribute of the brute who raped her.
Please do not denounce me for being dangerously woke but surely such misogyny is deeply embedded in our religio-cultural past. A Jewish teenager called Mariam betrothed to an older man was transformed, by the Church Fathers, into an ever-virgin. Women thereafter were separated into the First Eve – the fallen temptress of man – or the second Eve – saintly, demure and chaste. There can be no doubt which gender collected and shortlisted the letters and books that became the Greek New Testament, and which gender set the agenda of Christendom for the next two millennia. Orthodox Christian, Non-Chalcedonian, and the divided sons and daughters of the Western Rite Church (both Latin Catholic and various Protestant) – all hopelessly misogynistic do you not think?