Yep, alcohol is a factor in rape occurance. You know what? Plenty of rapes occur with no alcohol involved. When someone who has been raped has been drinking, other people regularly take that as evidence they are to blame. The same goes for wearing tight clothes, being out at night, walking alone, etc. But you know what? People who don’t do any of those things are raped, too. The one thing all rapes have in common? Is a rapist. Focussing on the behaviours of the people who are raped is ridiculous, because it is all about the behaviour of the rapist. See Melissa McEwan for more on this.

ETA another link.

I have no statistics, but I expect that alcohol is a factor in rape occurence, and remains so whether the man, the woman, or both have been drinking. If so, then this police campaign is simply correct.

Maybe I misread james’ post, but I got the impression he’s saying it’s worse — that they’re hijacking “concern for women’s safety” to push “don’t drink” for their own purposes. I mean, at the very least victim-blaming attempts to stop rape are sincerely aimed at stopping rape, but rape-victim-blaming attempts to stop people from *drinking* are taking something as serious and devastating as rape and using it as an excuse to push an agenda against drinking, which is kind of like arguing against murder because dead bodies carry disease and smell bad.

And Han, I love that campaign, especially the wedding picture.

The main issue here is that the police just don’t like people getting drunk. In most places over the Christmas drinking season there are very few on duty police officers to deal with large numbers of drunk people in a very precariously balanced public order situation.

I don’t think the alcohol thing is motivated by victim blaming as such, they’re just looking out for themselves. It’s a bit like on feminist blogs people will use even the most marginal topics as excuses to talk about stuff like rape and abortion that they care passionately about. That’s like what alcohol is for the police. They know come Thursday evening they’re going to be outnumbered 2000:1 by people who are absolutely tanked. They’re just gonna take any opportunity to warn people off drinking. I think they’re basically using rape as a tool to run an anti-alcohol campaign.

Shortly afterwards, the report’s point was proved by a case in which the judge instructed the jury to find the man not guilty, because although he had (Rúairi Dougal, then a student at Cardiff, like the woman he raped) admitted that he had (in his part-time role as a security guard) accepted responsibility for a young woman who was drunk and incapable, to walk her safely home, and had then had sex with her in the corridor outside her room, he claimed she’d consented … and she admitted under oath that she was so drunk she couldn’t remember. (On campus, apparently Ruari Dougal was well-liked and regarded as a decent bloke, while the woman he raped was regarded as a liar and an attention-seeker.) So the judge directed the jury to acquit, because in the judge’s world, if a woman was too drunk to remember having been raped, that means it can’t have been rape – even if the man who did it admits he had sex with someone for whom he had a duty of care, who was too drunk to give meaningful consent. Ruari Dougal was a high-publicity example of what’s wrong with rape law in the UK.

Lesley is right: a campaign against rape has got to take account of the thinking that “a woman too drunk to resist has consented” that not only will be held by rapists, rapist’s best buddies, and clueless guys, but by a large proportion of the survivors of rape, too.

I found some quite surprising and awful responses to my journal posts, four years ago, from people I’d known and liked, asserting that yes, sure, everyone knew that for a woman, drinking in public was high-risk and that it was anti-sex and anti-freedom to say that a person can be too drunk to give meaningful consent and that anyone who then has sex with that person is committing sexual assault/rape.