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So the UK’s National Health Service ran this fun, helpful, little totally triggering, victim-blaming ad as a part of its 2005 “Know Your Limits” campaign. It shows a crumpled crying woman flanked by stark white lettering: “One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking.”
How's that for some government-sanctioned victim-blaming? Pretty good right?
More upsetting, these posters ran for two years and, despite the campaign having ended in 2007, the UK is still littered with this garbage—some posters continue to don the walls of hospitals, schools and sexual health clinics.
The posters have received renewed backlash however through the social media efforts of bloggers including inspired Cambridge student Jack May who launched a petition asking the NHS to take all the remaining posters down. May calls the campaign “a blatant and appalling case of victim blaming by our own Government, putting the onus on the victim rather than the perpetrator.”
Yet even with 100,000+ signatures, the Department of Health is refusing to comply with his request—or apologize. A spokesperson for the Department of Health told The Huffington Post UK:
"This campaign is no longer used. Posters have not been in stock, or available on websites for several years. The problem is an issue for surgeries and hospitals displaying the poster. If they are still up after six years they should not be because the campaign has been refreshed since.”
Ah, thank you spokesperson. You’ve really captured the essence of the issue here. The campaign having been “refreshed” is exactly why people should take down the posters.
Or . . . perhaps Katie Russel of Rape Crisis England and Wales has it right:
"Not only is the image on this poster harrowing and potentially triggering for the huge numbers of survivors of sexual violence who will inevitably see it, but its central message is also misguided, damaging and insulting. The Government should acknowledge that the production of such a poster was never appropriate in the first place, and give a strong message that any remaining copies should no longer be displayed."
Further proof? One blogger’s ingenious makeover of the campaign poster has gone viral, demonstrating how deeply this issue still resonates. British tweeter @neverjessie offered up a few tweaks—and as a result has been retweeted 14,000 times and sparked a renewed focus on the issue:
Still depressed by all this? You could check out Scotland’s awesome “We Can Stop It” rape prevention campaign. Instead of indicting crying women, its posters show men saying awesomely "progressive" things like "I listen when a girl says no. Do you?" with the tagline "Sex without consent is rape. We can stop it."
So not only does it help inform what constitutes sexual assault, it does so without putting the onus of the crime on the victim—fancy that!
(Read: Are you taking notes you tea-swilling Brits?)
