My friend Bill just called me to say his daughter had been raped by a bloke she met on Tinder.
He told me his first response, which he bitterly regretted, was to say “But I told you not to go on that site, it’s not safe”.
Then I told a really close male friend, Alex, and he said “Well, that’s what I would have said too – why on earth did she put herself at risk?”.
Alex argued that’s a normal father’s response of ejaculatory fright and fury when his daughter’s been hurt. I couldn’t believe his insensitivity.
I thought it would rain further blows on a woman who’d already been violated. This time, from her father, saying it’s her fault. And that it would have perpetuated the same complacent acceptance that this is a norm that can’t be changed – men are ‘animals’ whose behaviour is out of their control, so women have to beware.
He disagreed. And thus ensued a terrible fight. He said going on Tinder was akin to walking into a dark alley. I said that was the same unhelpful mansplaining as when a senior Victorian cop warned us women in March “not to walk through parks alone” and to be a “little bit more careful”, after a man stabbed 17-year-old Masa Vukotic to death in a park 500m from her home in broad daylight.
How on earth can anyone, in any shape, manner or form, blame a woman for living her life when it’s a man who has viciously attacked her just for being there? I, and three of my closest women friends, have all been raped or assaulted – one raped by a stranger when she was 8, the others assaulted by men they lived with or knew. How is it our fault? How could we have made ourselves safer? These were crimes committed on us.
I just do not understand how men cannot get it. Even the good men. Why are they so resistant to the facts: women in Australia are under siege from so-called ‘normal’ men.
It’s all over the media and there’s a Royal Commission into Family Violence in process. One in 3 women are attacked physically, and 1 in 5 sexually, in Australia, with the vast majority of attacks by a man they know or their intimate partner. Nearly two women a week are killed by their partner or ex. Violence from our bloke is the main cause of death and injury of women of childbearing age in Australia … more than smoking and obesity combined, or illicit drugs and alcohol combined. Every three hours, a woman is hospitalised because of abuse by an intimate partner. More than half of all murders of women are by their intimate partner or ex.
So, when we are literally awash in the statistics of men’s violence against women, how can anyone say such stupid, insensitive, ignorant, lazy and harmful things? How can they say women should be more careful?
Do they think we don’t already know we are unsafe? Do they think any woman feels safe in the street, in the park, alone on the beach, on a walking track – just about anywhere? That we don’t already forego the pleasure and freedom that men take for granted to minimise our risk? That we don’t have strategies for avoiding an attacker, every day?
We know we are not safe.
Just where would you good men have us be safer?
If we can’t walk or travel to work or be at work (like 26-year-old high school teacher Stephanie Scott, who popped into school on Easter Sunday this year to prepare teaching notes and was murdered by the male cleaner), just where exactly do we go? Oh that’s right – we stay home.
Only – yes, that’s right again – home is the riskiest place of all. The men at home are the ones most likely to rape or kill us. The reason these men assault their women is clearly established by international research: it happens when there’s masculine dominance in that society, when men hold negative attitudes towards women, identify with traditional masculinity and male privilege, believe in rigid gender roles and have weak support for gender equality. Australia subscribes to these attitudes.
So, where do we go to be safe? There is no place. Our fathers telling us to avoid the parks and stay off dating sites is just not going to cut it.
And Tinder? Is it a hotbed of perverts and rapists that our daughters should know better than to expose themselves to? No, it is not. It is an app for a mobile device and the most popular dating site for young people in the world. Over 50 million people use it every month in 196 countries in 30 languages, providing 12 million matches a day.
The app works by analysing information from user’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, and suggesting matches to them wherever they are, based on mutual friends, activities and location. Log on, up come a series of photos of likely matches nearby, which you can reject (swipe left) or follow up on (swipe right), meet for coffee or a drink. Most users spend an hour and a half on it daily, delivering over one billion swipes.
I don’t have the statistics for sexual assault on Tinder compared with intimate partner violence or random assault, so I don’t know if the app attracts would-be rapists. The fact that my friend’s daughter says the bloke who raped her is known to the police and to Tinder is terrifying, in that it suggests a lack of duty of care by both. It suggests that Tinder needs a fail-safe mechanism to keep men with any record of violence against women off dating sites – and automatic links to the cops to ensure such men enter the criminal system.
Notwithstanding the possibility of rapists being attracted to the app, the young women I interviewed for this story overwhelmingly say they find Tinder safer than meeting a random guy at a bar, because Tinder puts the bloke in context and makes him more accountable, through the Facebook and Instagram connections, which you can check. The problem of safety, they say, and the facts support them, is that anywhere women are exposed to men, is potentially unsafe.
The real problem with dating, it seems, is the Australian male attitude that the mere consensual presence of a women entitles him to have sex with her. Tinder compounds the problem only insofar as it ups the numbers; the more men you meet up with, the more likely you’ll come across one who’ll act on his sense of entitlement. It is not where we women go, what we wear, or what we do that puts us at risk. It is men.
It will only start to improve when the first blame after a woman is assaulted is on the man who did it, and the first question on every fathers lips is “ Why are men doing this, and how can we get them to stop?”.
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DEBRIEF DAILY