Are Women Socialised to be Victims?

John Worboys, a London cab driver was yesterday sentenced to an 'indeterminate' jail sentence with a minimum of 8 years to be served. His crime? Drugging, sexually assaulting and raping women. He was sentenced for attacking 12 women, but police now say they believe he probably attacked over 100 women in the last 5 years or so.

How did he do this and how was he able to carry on for so long without being caught?

His method was to pick up young, attractive, professional women late at night who looked as though they had been drinking. He then told them he had won a large sum of money and asked them to celebrate with him by joining him in a glass of champagne. The champagne was spiked with a powerful prescription drug and over-the-counter medicine. This mixture, aligned with the alcohol they had previously drunk, left the women so incapacitated he was able to rape and sexually assault them.

Because of the drugs, many of the women did not remember what had happened when they woke; or their memories were so vague, disorganised or unlikely that they put them down to a drunken nightmare, or were too ashamed to talk to anyone about them.

There is a key aspect to this story. It is the reason Worboys was able to attack so many women. It is what allowed Worboys to continue his appalling activities for so long. It is the explanation of why the police did not take sufficient action when some women went to them with complaints against the malevolent cab driver.

That key aspect is how women are socialised. From the time they are born girls are taught to be nice, to care about other’s feelings, not to be rude and not to put others in a position where they would feel bad. A very, very basic summary of a very complicated subject, summed up in the verse ‘sugar and spice and all things nice; that’s what little girls are made of’.

So what has this got to do with the rapist Worboys? Firstly, he was not able to persuade the women to take another drink because they had already been drinking. They accepted the drink because he created an atmosphere that said they would spoil his wonderful day if they refused. And because of their socialisation to keep others happy, they found it almost impossible to refuse his offer.

Secondly, those women who could remember some or all of what had happened to them were probably totally unable to explain to themselves why they would do something as ‘stupid’ as to accepted alcohol from a stranger they were alone with late at night. Because they felt at least partially responsible for what had happened, many of them did not report the attack, or talk about what they thought they remembered.

It is almost certainly the case that no-one around them explained that the vast majority of our behaviour is unconscious. That is was the way they were brought up by their parents, teachers, peers and society that made it almost impossible for them to refuse the drink and ‘spoil his wonderful day’

Thirdly, if little girls are socialised to be ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’, then little boys are ‘slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails’. They are socialised to be top dog. To try and get in a one-up position and put others into a one-down position. In other words, their behaviour comes from unconscious promptings that are almost diametrically opposed to those of women’s.

Without going into too much detail, I must say here that these levels of socialisation are not absolute. They are on a scale and some women tend more toward the male end of the scale, while some men tend more towards the female end.

I am going to take a punt and say it is likely that female police officers’ would on the whole, tend to be leaning towards the male end of the scale rather than towards the very female end purely because of the nature of the job.

I would also like to totally emphasise that neither end of the scale is better, and very few people, male or female, have much control over where they are because it comes from conditioning we undergo as children which becomes totally unconscious.

Female________________________________Male

Where situations such as the one describe above arise, it is likely that men will be completely unable to understand why a women would accept a drink in the first place. Put yourself in the position of a police officer, male or female, who thinks this. They will not have much sympathy for the victim, they will assume most of what happened resulted from her being drunk in the first place; and because her memories will be patchy, they will find her unreliable as a witness. In other words, they will find it easy to dismiss her accusations.

Ask yourself that question again – are women socialised to be victims? Is this another gender gap we can’t breach?

I believe the answer to that question is often ‘yes’, especially in cases like that outlined above. But I do not think it needs to stay that way. As soon as you become consciously aware of why you behave in certain ways, you can start changing your behaviour. And if you are a parent, you can be careful about how you and your family socialise both boys and girls, so that they do not carry on the same patterns that have had such disastrous results in this case.