Among normal human populations, the rapist will pick a target ahead of time or take an opportunistic chance. The primary calculation is the risk of being caught. Criminals have bad judgment and bad character but they are not stupid and impulse ridden, for the most part.
That having been said, modesty has historically been considered a virtue for good reason, and is its own reward.
It probably has more to do with how much alcohol the woman has consumed (or various other mind altering substances)
And
Whether or not she is with someone.
A drunk lady w/ no one to protect her - it won’t matter what she’s wearing.
**I quite frankly doubt that dress has much to do with being rap**
Then why do hookers dress a certain way?
Agreed. Rape generally has more to do with power over and degrading the victim. "She was asking for it because...." has been the rapist's go-to excuse.
I agree with the article. And let me tell you, it is not easy teaching this to teenage girls with all the outside influences touting the opposite view.
Interesting what you say! Several years ago I read an article by a woman criminalologist who said that women who were attacked, raped or killed were often distracted women. Women who had had a bad day at work (for example) and were not paying attention to their surroundings. This hit me squarely as the truth. I lived in New York City during the highest crime rates but never, ever lost my attention to the people around me. No matter how I dressed (and sometimes provocatively) I was NEVER mugged or even pickpocketed. Perhaps it was blind luck but I think criminals are absolute genuises at reading what women are at risk and what women are on the ball.
And if I overindulged - shall we say - I always had a companion to see me into a taxi or into my home.
- Most convicted rapists do not remember what their victims were wearing.
- Victims range in age from days old to those in their nineties, hardly provocative dressers.
- A Federal Commission on Crime of Violence Study found that only 4.4% of all reported rapes involved provocative behavior on the part of the victim. In murder cases 22% involved such behavior (as simple as a glance).
In western cultural today the theory is highly politically incorrect, and it seems to have been an unresolved and contentious issue for most of human history. Today one is mocked and derided for even suggesting it.
But if that fact sheet is representative of what is available as a rebuke to the theory, well, that's *very* lightweight. Provocative is in the eye of the beholder. Clearly just being a woman is provocative enough to some males to trigger them into the predator mode of wanting to rape!
Nor does the fact sheet, or the sample of essays and blog posts I just quickly reviewed, give a sense of old school common sense in the discussion. What do I mean by that? Well for one thing, old school common sense says that rape is not just about sex, it is about power. The assertion of a male or gang of males of power over others who are weak.
It is helpful to think of such crimes -- crimes of power -- in a predator vs prey motif. Take a given street scene in a busy city, town, campus, or shopping district. There are many prey. But the most provocatively dressed females are often the most physically powerful of prey. Common sense suggests that the sexually provocative dress will turn on the hunting mode of the predator. But where will the predator find his prey?
As in the animal kingdom! The predator targets the weak, the old, the very young, the injured. As a class this group will be dressed modestly, but have the one aspect that the predator is seeking. They are female.
And that's just one aspect of really honestly analyzing rape and modesty, common sense-wise. Where is such common sense?
Hard to find. Rape is a highly emotional issue.
Rape is common in Arab cultures where "modest" dress is the law. Yet it is not right to call such overdone coverage as face veils and full burkas, or the old Catholic nun garb, modest. Such overblown super-covering is immodest in the other direction. By covering up too much it is equally screaming about what is covered. Sexual imagination is a fierce awesome power, the over-modest dress of burkhas and old nun's garb constantly says "we're hiding something from you that you want".
The effect is like how the high value of the gold at Fort Knox is constantly suggested by the immense security around it, so that even one who lives day-by-day near Fort Knox ever forgets that there is really valuable gold there. If the security around Fort Knox were truly modest, no one would be aware of it day-by-day.
The common sense truth is YES, sexually immodest dress will case more breakdowns in a community's sexual behavior. And thus more rapes, among other forms of breakdown in sexual mores. But the VICTIMS of such sexual provocations can be the ones who dress modestly.