Teenagers and Victim-Blaming

I one day stumbled across a message board site called Teen Spot and it is pretty much a place for teens to talk. I went onto the advice column out of curiousity and see a post about someone being raped by her boyfriend. The person didn’t sound too convincing that they were raped but I wasn’t quick to jump to conclusions that the person was obviously lying, some people express things differently about what happened to them. What disturbed me as the thread was the OBSESSIVE amount of victim-blaming that was going on through the message boards.

Here’s post one:

“Nobody on Teenspot gives a shit if you’ve been raped. If you really want to do something about it, and you weren’t a troll, I would say to tell an adult you trust….you would think at 17, that would be instilled in your brain….since that’s what you learn in 1st grade.”

My response to this is that yes they do tell us to always tell an adult but if this person had any sense on rape and rape victims, it’s hard for a rape victim to tell someone. I didn’t tell anyone about my sexual abuse until a couple years after it happened and I still didn’t go to the authorities about it. Many rape victims don’t.

The second post was outright victim-blaming and it made me throw up in my mouth:

“I agree with the girl above, You should have known what to do since firstgrade.

You, an obvious troll. You Probally deserved it.

Keep your legs shut.”

I hate when people say idiotic comments like this because rape-victims, espcially teenage girls, usually get blamed when they get raped. And the comment where the poster ended with keep your legs shut, shows how disgusting the victim-blaming has got it. How can you keep your legs shut if someone is forcing them open? And what does that have to do with rape is the better question.

The same poster had even posted more about rape:

“Most girls, will Ask for it… beg and tease a guy.

Then when their done, Oh! You..raped me! I’M TELLING! / They break up a week later and she wants revenge.

It’s girls like YOU, who gives the rest of us a bad name.”

I love how the person felt the need to victim-blame twice. I don’t know about you but I never heard of a girl screaming rape because she broke up with the guy. I personally have had some bad experiences with guys considering that I’m in high school and it happens but I never pinned rape on a guy to get revenge. I don’t know any girls that have and I hate the comment about begging and teasing a guy. It’s one of the top things that people use to defend rapists.

I feel no need to post anymore posts because the whole thread was truly disgusting. There were people that called her an attention whore, people that kept repeating on how if she didn’t want to be raped, she should have kept her legs shut, and even people that agreed with the second poster that if a girl leads a guy on or makes him think he’s interested than it’s okay for him to rape her.

The sad thing about this entire thread was that majority of the posters seemed to be teenage girls or girls in their early 20’s and sadly only one girl on the thread defending the fact that there was no excuse for raped (and then she got attacked and debated against). It says something to my generation. Why is it that teenagers feel like rape can somewhat be acceptable and how is the next generation going to be when it views things like rape, abuse, and other things?