alerted by ginmar

[novapsyche]

A third of people believe a woman is partially or completely responsible for being raped if she has behaved flirtatiously, a survey suggests. (Note: this survey took place in Britain)

Also, as ginmar notes: "Why... do we keep saying 'when women get raped'? It's passive voice without an actual person doing the raping. Why is that, huh?"

Comments

[mr-quackenbush.livejournal.com]

crimes are always in the passive voice when we're talking about the victim. "her parents murdered." "His pocket was picked." "my house was broken in to." "the convenience store was robbed."

[mr-quackenbush.livejournal.com]

*parents were murdered.

I'd like to go on and point out that this is the reason we have the passive voice at all. It exists as a construction in order to talk about something happening to something. As such it's entirely appropriate grammatically to use it when speaking about victims of sexual assault because being a victim places one in the category of having something happen to you. It's intellectually irresponsible to assume that this is a unique grammatical case that says something about cultural attitudes towards rape victims, when it in fact has nothing unique about it.