Beginning a Campaign to Prevent Sexual Assault Involving Alchohol and Drugs
By Ga-on
Published: February 16, 2016
Translated by Marilyn
Hook
Editor’s note: The
Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center is leading a campaign against sexual
assault committed with the help of alcohol or drugs, called #ThatsRape. This
5-part series of articles explores the discussions held by the campaign’s
planning committee, as well as their questions and recommendations for change.
Change your way of
thinking about sexual violence
My decision to conduct
a campaign to prevent sexual violence involving alcohol or drugs was an
impulsive one.
In October of last
year, the anti-misogyny group Magelia was in full swing, and the Internet was
crowded with revelations about Soranet, a website that acted as a base for the
circulation of hidden camera footage of women, and similar examples of male
sexual culture. I, of course, was brimming with anger. But more than simply
being angry, I had a sense of being angry together, with others. I didn’t want
that feeling to disappear with the passage of time. Before a sense of
powerlessness came, I wanted to meet people that I could work with to
accomplish something.
So, I submitted a
proposal to the Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center, and started a campaign to
prevent sexual violence committed with the help of alcohol or drugs in
November. When recruitment for campaign volunteers was announced at the KSVRC
and 20 people signed up, I knew that I hadn’t been the only one with such a
wish. We collected funds for the campaign, and got started with the financial
support of 139 people.
 |
| A meeting of the planning committee of the #ThatsRape campaign ©KSVRC |
And for two months,
I’ve had experiences and discussions that were even better than I had imagined.
I began to think about sexual violence in a very different way. After doing one
street campaign, the things that I wanted to say also changed. With every meeting,
more things to say piled up. I think these things cannot be contained even in
this 5-part series or the information book that the campaign team will hand out
at the final public conference at the end of this month
These things that I
want to say are not perfect, and are made of different, unruly strands of
questions and feelings. I want to deliver this coil of words to the people with
whom I shared anger about sexual assault. Just as our campaign started from
some things said online, the things that I’m going to say may become points of
departure for the people who read them, and if I can then build on their
responses, I’ll be happy.
A misogynistic society
causes and abets sexual violence
A shared rage became
the basis for the #ThatsRape campaign. Misogyny is certainly not a new thing.
But online misogyny has visibility and influence, and was affecting women in
real life. For a long time, however, it was understood as the deviant actions
of a few “loser” men who had failed in the dating market and confined to the
particular community known as “Ilbe” (an abbreviation of “Ilganbesteu
jeojangso”), and its influence was underestimated.
But once it was called
out as misogyny and started to receive attention, it wasn’t long until it was
revealed how densely this surrounds the sexual culture of men – or rather, of
half of society. And when we learned, through online communities and social
networking sites, how this online culture was linked with violence against
women, my fellow women and I were shocked.
It was revealed that
rape involving alcohol and drugs is happening countless times at the hands of
boyfriends or acquaintances, or at random. The Internet is overflowing with
illegal sites that sell drugs for use in committing rape, and rape stories that
include evaluations of the drug used, as well as pictures, were shared on
Soranet. On Soranet, a site which required no authentification to join, male
users uploaded pictures of women’s genitals, taken when the women were
incapacitated by alcohol or drugs, and posts seeking accomplices to rape, with
titles like “Seeking an invited man,”
appeared nearly daily. It was stunning how none of the men who left
comments on these posts recognized these acts as crimes, and that this site,
which boasts of having 1 million members, is South Korea’s most popular adult
site.
Soranet’s homepage
could be found through a public Twitter account that announced a constantly
changing web address, and this account has 380,000 followers. After Twitter got
caught up in outrage over Soranet, one user began to send the message, “Are you
on Soranet?” to every single follower of this account. That user couldn’t have
expected the response. Even though Soranet is a certifiably criminal site that
shares footage from hidden cameras and recruits participation in rape, a fierce
protest arose from men who argued that simply asking Soranet’s Twitter
followers, “Are you on Soranet?” was rude, unfair, sexually Puritan, and a form
of oppression.
A culture that doesn’t
allow you to say, “Don’t commit rape”
That’s where this
campaign starts from. In a culture in which sexual violence against women is
widespread, the targets of requests to change behavior have always been women.
Warnings like, “Don’t wear revealing clothes,” or “Don’t drink alcohol,” have
been directed at women. Even though most forms of sexual assault, including
rape involving drugs, could not be prevented by women being more careful, there
exists a social resistance to ordering men around.
 |
| “What would you do?” A street campaign conducted on Christmas Eve 2015 ©KSVRC |
Male sexual culture is
formed in a way that justifies sexual violence. Even with men with whom they
are not close, men will tell dirty jokes, trade pornography, circulate detailed
stories about sexual experiences with their girlfriends, or, while engaging in
prostitution together, will avoid identifying and distinguishing between their
accomplices in this culture. In this way, each individual man avoids becoming
an agent responsible for sexually violent culture.
This process also
allows a perpetrator of sexual violence to see himself as one of countless
ordinary men instead of as an individual wrongdoer. Sexual assault is not
something that happens between a perpetrator and a victim, but involves innumerable
faceless accomplices, existing as a normal thing that is constantly authorized
by and viewed on websites like Soranet.
This kind of cultural
conspiracy does not exist only among men. The idea that it is hard for men to
control their sexual desires and that not controlling these desires is
“masculine” is reproduced in many ways. On the other hand, the idea that women
must not reveal their sexual desires and that a woman appearing as a sexual
being gives men the right to “follow their instincts” and have sex with her is
shared even by police and courts. This is the reason that reports of sexual
assault are often ignored or the perpetrator is declared not guilty or given a
light sentence.
Education that
naturalizes sexual assault as a male instinct and puts the responsibility to be
careful on women is as ubiquitous and unnoticed as air, whether in school or in
the home. Women are repeatedly told to
be careful because they could be raped, and this idea burrows deeply into their
conscious and subconscious mind. But to whom could we say, “Don’t commit or
help commit rape”? Implying to someone that they might commit rape or that rape
might happen around them may be seen as rude and aggressive.
No matter in what
context it is said – person-to-person, in a group, office, store, or school,
among friends or lovers – no one hears orders like “Don’t rape” or “Don’t allow
rape to happen” as directed at themselves. People sweep them aside as perfunctory
or even get angry at the implication that such commands could apply to them.
They tell the speaker to go to the kind of place that such things happen and
talk directly to the bad people.
“It’s not my
problem, it’s between the perpetrator and victim”
It’s been a while since
I became a feminist, but sexual violence was not an important topic for me
during most of that time. It wasn’t because it was such a clear issue that it
didn’t seem worthy of discussion, but because it is an unattractive topic that is
very difficult to discuss. I didn’t want to think of it as my problem. “I’ve
never had any real experience with sexual assault,” “I don’t normally feel very
vulnerable to sexual assault,” “I don’t have confidence in my ability to
empathize with a victim of sexual assault,” these were the kind of things that
I thought but knew better than to say, out of shame.
It is only while
running this campaign that I’ve realized that I was like that because I didn’t
want to feel uncomfortable, and I became aware of my position as someone who
had adjusted to living in a society that conspired to make me distance myself
from sexual violence and see it as something that was between the perpetrator
and victim. As long as men and women are divided into “the agent who tries to
attain and who possesses” and “the object that is protected and that belongs,”
there is a sense in which all people who are ordered to be one or the other are
victims. And all those who depend on that division and help strengthen it are
also perpetrators.
 |
| Advertising materials for #ThatsRape ©KSVRC |
The right not to be
raped is one that no one can deny, but in a situation in which common wisdom
about gender justifies sexual assault and makes it impossible to guarantee that
right, #ThatsRape hopes to challenge the beliefs of each and every person. That
means separating and naming each responsible party that has so long been
unclear under the name of “the public,” and calling for reconsideration of
beliefs and changes in behavior. Responsibility exists regardless of gender and
belongs to everyone not previously aware of this problem.
The planning committee,
which of course belongs to this group, has gone through a lot of changes over
the past two months. Talking about the necessity of tearing down this common
wisdom was easy, but imaging what a person or group who had gotten free would
actually be like was new and unknown terrain. That unknown terrain was a place
that we could only have found together, through two months of meetings,
discussions, and public forums. It may not be the terrain of a campaign whose
message is clear and exact, but it is the terrain where this discourse grows
and develops.
“Parade for
Doing It with Consent” on Valentine’s Day
We didn’t want to do
just another ineffective anti-rape campaign, because we knew that everyone
agrees with that idea in theory but doesn’t really take it to heart. Instead,
we wanted to do something that would make people feel uncomfortable by going
against the common wisdom, and hoped that this would push them to discover the
problem.
So the highlight of the
campaign will be a Valentine’s Day march down Yeonse-ro in Sinchon. During the
march, we will walk like we are drunk, collapse in the street, and let our
skirts flip up to show symbolically that the problem of sexual assault does not
lie with the victims. And we will shout in rejection of violent masculinity.
After the march, the
discussion will continue. In the articles to follow in this series, I, a woman
who couldn’t even recognize the damage before she had the words for it, a queer
person who has been violently pressured to fit in the category “man,” a citizen
who is not being protected by laws and systems, and a feminist, will attempt to
become free of sexual violence culture and look for ways to change it. Every
time a person’s position changes, a new method for doing this must be found.
It is only when everyone discusses in depth
the responsibility for sexual violence and accepts it as their own that this
campaign spurred by the Internet can have real results. I hope that until then,
these people who have been angry together will not give in to a sense of
powerlessness and will unspool and extend the threads of discussion.
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| A poster advertising the “Parade for Doing It With Consent” Valentine’s Day march in the Sinchon area of Seoul ©KSVRC |
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