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]

*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.