Open Space: No such thing as a safe space

Views February 20, 2013

There was a story in the last issue of Nexus about an event that the Camosun College Student Society was getting ready to host: a dance party as part of the One Billion Rising movement. One Billion Rising is a global movement of people, primarily women, rising up in protest of violence against women. This movement seeks to shake people of the ability to ignore the massive global issue of violence against women, to help women empower themselves to speak out against gender-based violence, and to be a call to both men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends.

One Billion Rising was named after the amount of women who are currently on the planet who will experience some form of physical or sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. The campaign brings to light the startling statistic that one in three women globally will experience violence.

The amount of women who face violence in every society and space around the world is almost unfathomable.

However, many people are, surprisingly, willing to place blame on the women against whom violence is perpetrated. In last issue’s article, a student was quoted saying that she believed that it was “just as much a woman’s responsibility to not be in that situation in the first place.”

The attitude behind this quote is known as victim blaming. Victim (or survivor) blaming is a way of reversing the responsibility from, for example, not raping people to the responsibility of not “getting” raped. Unfortunately, society conditions us to think this way. Opinions like this are normalized through mainstream media, and are so socially acceptable that people rarely even understand the violence that these opinions justify.

One Billion Rising is a rejection of the idea that safe spaces exist that women somehow violate and, as a result of that, put themselves at risk of becoming victimized. Violence is perpetrated against women in our homes, in clubs, on the streets, on buses… Rather than making women feel responsible for not being attacked, everyone needs to take responsibility for creating safer spaces for women to exist, where we do not need to fear violence.