Political Protests: Victim Blaming

"Women are not guilty for violence committed by men on their body, mind and spirit"

My group; Sophie, Zoe, Chloe and myself, decided that we were going to base our political protest on the subject of victim blaming. In our world obsessed with rape culture, victim blaming is at an ultimate high and we felt it was an extremely important and prominent issue to address. We focused on the victim blaming towards women as it's an issue that effects females more, though not limit to, than males.

We took different quotes from various rape cases we had researched, for example; "Some girls enjoy being raped" - Israeli Judge Nissim Yeshaya in an appeal court ruling on the gang rape of a 13 year old girl by four Palestinian boys, and then placed each quote on to a single piece of paper. We felt that we didn't need to decorate the posters with different colours or add detail as we felt getting the message across clearly was the most important part and it didn't need any sugar coating. We chose to use a black bold font on a white back ground as it's bold and it stands out as well as being quite plain - this links with the fact that the issue being presented with should be plainly dealt with, yet it's sugar coated with excuses to villianise the victims. We explored and used different victim blaming excuses from various different rape cases to add context and realism to our protest; "Not all rape is rape", "She drank too much", "Just let it happen."

We chose the song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams, as since it was released it's caused a lot of controversy throughout the media and across the world. The song has been accused of featuring 'date-rape' lyrics, such as the repeated section of "I know you want it." As well as many rape survivors also compared the lyrics from Thicke's song to those from the mouths of their rapists. We chose to link the lyric of "I know you want it"  with the often used excuse of "She was asking for it" as it poses the idea that the man knew the wanted it, and that she was practically asking for it. This was the exact idea we were trying to protest against and so by using such a popular song, we were able to bring our argument relevance and use an example so relevant to our pop culture. 

In addition to the placards with the quotes, we used the traditional protest aspect of chanting in our piece. We decided that we all as a group would chant "Women are not guilty for violence committed by men on their body, mind and spirit" - a quote taken from a feminism based website, as it really underlined what we were trying to present. We are not guilty for men's against us, no matter how many excuses they try and draw up.