News

On Saturday September 1 Dunedin’s second annual Slutwalk hit the streets. Beginning outside the Dental School, the marchers progressed along George Street to the Octagon, where they were addressed by speakers on the topics of slut-shaming and victim-blaming.

The “Slutwalk” movement began last year, after a Toronto police officer recommended that to decrease the incidence of rape, “women should avoid dressing like sluts”. The message of Slutwalk was that anyone can be a victim of rape, regardless of what they are wearing; that the victim should never be blamed.

Dressed in an array of outfits, from the stereotypically “slutty”, to jeans and t-shirts, to a young woman in full Little Bo Peep garb, roughly 150 men and women of all ages walked with the purpose of drawing attention to victim-blaming and the irrelevance of clothing to a rapist’s motives.

Loren Ferrel of Rape Crisis said: “Sexual abuse is a societal problem. One in three girls before the age of 18, and one in six boys before the age of 18, will have experienced some form of sexual abuse.”

Speaking to Channel 9, Georgia Knowles, who is the National Co-ordinator of Rape Crisis, said that alongside Slutwalk’s message to stop victim-blaming was the idea that “people should be able to operate with a diverse range of sexualities… dress ‘slutty’ one day and not the next… and that should be all right.”

She pointed to societal norms regarding sexuality as the source of rape culture, rather than clothing or drunkenness: “There is nothing inherently violent about male sexuality and there’s nothing inherently victimising about female sexuality. It’s about the way that we talk about it, and it’s about the way that we practice it.”

Rape Crisis Dunedin said in a statement that “awareness-raising of this sort is invaluable for holding our culture to account for the prevalence of rape and victim-blaming. The march also helped to let survivors know that they are not alone and we are on their side.”