Support the “Rape Is No Joke” campaign

Leicester Socialist Students at DMU and University of Leicester are holding a comedy night to launch this campaign, with Tim Sayers and Lydia Towsey performing. You can find Lydia’s blog here – http://secretagentartist.wordpress.com/.

We are hoping for a positive and funny evening, to celebrate comedy without misogyny. You will find us in the Basement, Wellington St on the 22nd of November at 8 pm. Everyone who supports our campaign is very welcome to join us. There will be an entry fee of 5 pounds waged/ 3 pounds un-waged, and all profits will go to Socialist Students at DMU and University of Leicester. You can also visit our website for more information and to sign the pledge: http://rapeisnojoke.com/

The Rape is no Joke campaign was set up by Socialist Students as a response to rape jokes across the country. A woman in the audience of an comedy gig by the US comedian Daniel Tosh bravely spoke out, saying “Rape jokes are never funny”. He replied by saying: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”

These jokes do not emerge in a vacuum, but they are a reflection of opinions in the society as a whole. The former US congressman Todd Akin claimed that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”. You don’t have to go far in Britain either to find statements like this. George Galloway claimed that allegations against Julian Assange by two Swedish women were not rape; “at least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it”, it was just “bad sexual etiquette.”

800,000 women a year are rape victims. Also, 1 million women in England and Wales are victims of domestic abuse and 400,000 are sexually assaulted. It is estimated that only 15% of rapes are reported to the police and only 24% of the reported cases end with a conviction. These are not acceptable statistics. And it is not fair to these victims to trivialise them. Rape is a serious; there is nothing like consensual rape and certainly no “light” form of rape either. It is a terrifying, violent and humiliating experience that no woman wants or asks for.

The way that rape is portrayed in the media is not representative either. While you might think that you are most likely to get raped by a stranger, the majority of the perpetrators are in fact known to the victim. “Only” 9 % of rapes are committed by strangers. The myth that women have to be careful in walking alone at night restricts our freedom. It is also putting the message across that if a women gets raped it is her own responsibility. Neither the clothing nor the behaviour of a woman can justify rape. It is also demeaning to men, suggesting they are wild savages unable to control their sexual urges.

So where do rape jokes fit into this picture? You may wonder if they are pretty harmless when you look at the bigger picture. No, it is not when you combine it with prolific violent pornography on the internet, ‘lads mags’ in every corner shop and aggressive sexual imagery in advertising. Rape jokes inform action. Imagine this scenario: a girl has just started at university and she is going out with her flat mates. During the evening she loses them and ends up standing drunk outside of the club. Some guys pulls up to her in a car offering her to take her home. They go in an opposite direction and dump her off in the cold. These actions come as a result of rape jokes and various other things promoting a culture that accepts, and even glorifies rape and sexual assault

Socialist Students are not calling for a state ban of rape jokes. We think that wouldn’t tackle the real problem. By making rape jokes, comedians support a wider ideological attack on women. We are inviting individual and comedy clubs to sign our pledge and make a conscious decision to say no to rape jokes. We are not asking for rape to be tabooed either, but we would rather have it treated as a serious topic for a debate on how we can stop this attack on women, rather than trivialised by ‘humour’ which is degrading to rape victims.

Rebecca Christiansen
President of Socialist Students at University of Leicester