You aren't one of those people who think someone can ever be responsible for being raped or assaulted. You know that no one is ever actually 'asking for it.' You know that rape is always the fault of the rapist. But there are some people who haven't quite figured it out yet. Addressing them, London-based comedian Alice Brine penned a witty analogy, and it perfectly highlights the stupidity of victim blaming.
While it is a serious topic, Brine's text is as clever as it is funny and has amassed over 200,000 likes and 95,000 shares on Facebook. "At the time [of the post] there was a cricket player in New Zealand who was in the spotlight for sexual assault," she told Bored Panda. "The media was blowing up with headlines like 'She said no, but did she mean it?' Even one publication went as far as to say "She told him she was on the pill, so how could it be rape?" I got so frustrated seeing all those headlines and wrote the status."
"I find that the post starts trending again <...> when there is a particular event happening that it relates to," Alice added. "Right nowI'mm getting tagged in a lot of retweets about a US senator that not too many people are happy with..."
The comedian thinks that victim blaming is a huge worldwide problem. "It's not a bunch of people shouting loudly at all, it's embedded into the fragments that build our society."
And the academia agrees with her. One theory suggests that this kind of victim blaming is inherently human. It's called the just-world bias and was first formulated by Melvin Lerner in the early 1960s. After his original experiments, Lerner suggested that seeing innocent people getting hurt with no resolution of the situation violates the observers' sense of the world as just.
"There’s just this really powerful urge for people to want to think good things happen to good people and where the misperception comes in is that there's this implied opposite: if something bad has happened to you, you must have done something bad to deserve that bad thing," Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology at Sewanee University said. "We want to think that if we do the right thing, it's all going to be OK. It’s threatening to see other people not be OK, so we want to come up with an explanation of why that experience won’t happen to us."
Scroll down to read Alice's analogy and tells us what you think in the comments.
More info: Facebook
New Zealand comedian Alice Brine had been sick and tired of victim blaming when it comes to rape or sexual assault
Image credits: Alice Brine
So she wrote this analogy to prove that no one is ever 'asking for it'
Image credits: Alice Brine
Applauding her wit, over 201,000 people have already liked her post
P.S. Alice has one more message. "Is there literally anyone reading this in London who will give me a comedy gig? Please book me."