Anti-rape campaigns: “Hey women, stop getting so drunk”

Anti-rape campaigns which focus solely on women’s behaviour are nothing new: previous publicly-funded campaigns have told women ‘Don’t be a victim’ and ‘Let down your hair, not your guard’.

So there is at least some difference between West Mercia police’s anti-rape campaign and the usual choice of tactics, and that’s that their posters aren’t solely at a female audience.  Instead they have posters warning both men and women not to ‘let a night full of promise turn into a morning full of regret’ by getting so drunk that their night ends in ‘regretful sex or even rape’. Should we at least be thankful that West Mercia police (and Hertfordshire police, who also used this campaign during Christmas 2011) are acknowledging that rape does involve men, rather than following the baffling trend of treating sexual violence as a ‘women’s issue’?

The outpouring of disgusted comments on Twitter imply a blunt NO. The notion that there’s anything a victim of rape – a crime in which a person is forced into sex – can do to ‘avoid’ sexual violation is mind-bogglingly