Rape is a socially constructed menace

Even though we have to accept that rape cases will always be amongst us since there will always be mad people in our midst, we have to realise that we can drastically reduce the rate of occurrences of rape. The majority of rape crimes are not committed by mentally disturbed people, but by people who have been socialised to think and behave in a certain way. It is this kind of thinking that encourages rape that we have to change in both men and women.

                I was shocked the other day to realise that the majority of Zimbabwean boys and men believe that a girl or woman who is a virgin will not lose that virginity willingly and therefore has to be raped. I thought that kind of thinking had disappeared sometime in the eighties or the nineties at the latest. I once witnessed a girl losing her virginity when I was a young boy. From whatever angle I try to approach it; I always come to the same conclusion: That girl was raped. She had willingly gotten into the room, but she did not want to have sex because a lot of force was used and even as a young boy, I realised that the girl was traumatised after the act and refused to move from the crime scene. Her sister and her sister’s boyfriend had to beg her to go back home.

It seems the streets are full of boys, young men and old men who go around thinking women will not give up sex willing and therefore have to be raped. Perhaps we should get into the men’s heads that any kind of forced sexual intercourse is rape. Whilst we are at it, we should also get it into women’s heads that ‘playing hard to get’ does not belong in this century. Honestly, how can we get it into men’s heads that rape is rape if there are women who expect men to rape them in the name of being ‘real’ men?

            Another serious cause of rape is the patriarchy system that expects women to ‘respect’ all men. Isn’t it bad enough that African women are expected to ‘respect’ their husbands? On top of that, they have to ‘respect’ their father in law, the husband’s brothers and cousins and a whole busload of ‘relatives’. Why should a woman cook for, serve food to and wash for a houseful of men? What happens when some of them make sexual advances as they will inevitably do? She will keep quite like a ‘respectful’ wife in order to maintain ‘family peace’. And those sexual advances will become rape if she turns them down: One of the downsides of lobola payment perhaps? It is said a man does not marry a woman for himself, but for the family. If her husband’s brother has got dirty clothes, she washes them. That’s what a ‘proper woman’ does. It does not end there, unfortunately: A woman’s duties include sexual favours in the depraved minds of men.

            The most problematic cause of rape is the fact that women do not propose love to men. Since women do not propose love to men, they use all sorts of actions to show the men they are interested in that they are interested. As a result of this assertion, men are always on the lookout for these signs that women are supposed to give out to show that they are interested in a particular man. The tricky thing about this is that there is no clear distinction between a woman who is smiling because she just loves smiling and a woman who is smiling because she is interested in a man. There is no distinction between a woman who is showing her panties because her mama never taught her to sit properly and a woman who is showing her panties because she is saying ‘come fuck me’ to the man across the room.

            As civilised animals, we should drop all this nonsense about not communicating directly when it comes to matters of sex, otherwise we will have men raping women on a daily basis and not knowing that they are committing a serious crime. Conversations like:

“Can you come to my place tonight?” Man

“What do you want?” Woman

“There is something I want to show you.” Man

Such kind of conversations should come to an end. The man should just say he wants to fuck her and the woman should give a straight yes if she is interested. We need a serious adjustment to our thinking and behaviour if we are to fight the scourge of rape.