Quote Originally Posted by allegro View Post
If that girl went out and got drunk and drove a car and killed a family of 5, is she not at least partly responsible for that?
I don't get it, I'm sorry. Yes, she would be fully responsible for driving drunk. No, she would not be responsible for getting penetrated without consent.

Listen, I agree that it's bad for people to drink themselves unconscious and that it's good to use common sense, but I get extremely irritated when the focus is shifted from the rapists' behaviour to the victim's behaviour. We're making an issue of what she did, instead of what they did, why they did it and why they're getting support from their communities and sympathies from news anchors. What those boys did to her went WAY beyond "stupid drunken teen behaviour". To make this a lesson in "this is what happens when you drink, kids, especially you, girls" is to ignore problems much more harmful and much more relevant than binge drinking. "Females should be sober at parties" is not and should not be the moral of the story.

I don't believe there will ever be a time when teenagers don't get shitfaced, and I don't believe there will ever be a time when people don't rape each other. But what can be changed, I believe, is how communities react to rape, how the society treats the victims, how it treats the rapists and what it focuses on in the aftermath. And as usual, we choose to focus on what the victim did wrong.