We can broaden our understanding of rape culture, call out misogyny, challenge rigid gender norms and counter victim-blaming in our communities
Opinion: Michael Fraser was sentenced in the Dunedin District Court this month for several violent offences against a woman, including strangulation and assault with intent to commit sexual violation.
After meeting the woman in a bar and heading home to engage in consensual sex, Fraser slapped her hard across the face and strangled her. Fortunately, she was able to escape and subsequently reported the offending to the police. He messaged her the next day asking if she would like to hang out, as if nothing had happened.
When news of his sentencing broke, many were outraged to learn that in 2020 he had been acquitted of raping two women and choking them during sex. In that trial, he argued the events were not rape but consensual “rough sex”. His lawyer claimed the women’s allegations were false, exaggerated and that Fraser was the “victim of a good, old-fashioned Kiwi stitch-up”.
Trials involving violence against women – especially sexual violence – are notoriously harrowing experiences that rarely result in conviction. A 2019 Ministry of Justice report found only 31 percent of reported sexual assaults proceed to a charge and only 11 percent result in a conviction.
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The picture is even bleaker when both reported and unreported assaults are taken into account: it’s estimated only 1 in every 100 results in a conviction.
Blaming the victim
When cases do make it to court, defence questioning is invasive, often focusing on the women’s conduct prior to, during, or after the alleged offending.
Adding rough sex into the mix implies it could not be rape and provides another avenue for discrediting women’s stories while normalising ideas about violence and sex
Evidence of this type of questioning is everywhere, including in media reports from Fraser’s previous trial where a young woman denied wanting rough sex, but the defence suggested she was “out to seek a bit of excitement” and became “overwhelmed” by the “rough sex” that took place – sex the defence lawyer suggested was desired and pleasurable.
It is hard to imagine something more difficult than answering intimate questions about a traumatising event in a room full of strangers. What compounds this difficulty is the way questioning builds on existing cultural narratives about violence and sex within rape culture, harnessing the power of myths to discredit – and silence – women’s stories.
A rape culture is an environment where sexual violence is prevalent, tolerated and normalised through attitudes and belief systems – founded on myths – which trivialise and excuse sexual violence.
Common myths include the idea that a typical rape is perpetrated by a stranger late at night in a dark alleyway, where the victim holds no responsibility for the attack. While stranger rapes do happen, they are rare. Most perpetrators are known to the victim.
Despite this, the dominance of the stranger danger trope is clear: when incidents do not mirror the scenario, victim-blaming rhetoric (“she was asking for it") is common.
Also common is the idea that women make false allegations or exaggerate the incident, implying their accounts are untrustworthy. However, false rape allegations make up less than 10 percent of all reports.
These myths create the idea that rape and sexual violence are rare and exceptional, which is not the reality.
The rough sex defence
The rough sex defence – that what happened was not rape but consensual rough sex – is contributing to this mythmaking.
Rough sex means different things to different people, but choking has been identified as a common behaviour.
There are some people – including women – who might enjoy consensual rough sex or choking with respectful sexual partners. However, we know this is a gendered experience: men are most likely to choke female partners, with a significant proportion of 18 to 39-year-old men surveyed by the BBC reporting they do this without verbally asking for consent.
Young people identify pornography as a sexual educator in their lives, so we must ensure we incorporate critical discussions about the consent and aggression inherent in much mainstream pornography
This mirrors accounts from women in the same age group who report that rough sex and choking/non-fatal strangulation during sex is often experienced non-consensually.
The knowledge that some women like rough sex is dangerously morphing into assumptions that all women “like it rough”. This was evident in reporting on Fraser’s 2020 trial, where his texts to an ex-partner revealed he believed it was “not fair” that some women like her enjoyed being choked, but when he did it to other women it was like he was “raping them or whatever”.
The idea that women desire to be choked also surfaced during the trial of Jesse Kempson for murdering Grace Millane. A young man in the trial testified that placing one’s hands on a woman’s neck is common and he did this “because girls usually enjoy it”.
In rough sex cases, the idea that women “like it rough” gains traction by building on existing stereotypes. The rape myths described earlier situate sexual violence as exceptional, frequently question women’s truthfulness and suggest that claims of sexual violence are at best exaggerated and, at worst, false. Adding rough sex into the mix implies it could not be rape and provides another avenue for discrediting women’s stories while normalising ideas about violence and sex.
I suggest the outrage people feel about the Fraser case might be usefully channelled in a way that helps dismantle rape culture in Aotearoa. We can do this in a range of ways, such as by broadening our understanding of rape culture, calling out misogyny, challenging rigid gender norms and countering victim-blaming in our communities.
We must also encourage open conversations about sex and consent, reasserting that consent is an ongoing process as sexual activities progress, rather than a ‘one-off’ tick-box exercise.
These conversations should include the challenging topic of pornography. Young people identify pornography as a sexual educator in their lives, so we must ensure we incorporate critical discussions about the consent and aggression inherent in much mainstream pornography.
While it can be hard to talk to young people about these issues, they tell us that they want to talk about them, so we must listen and respond.
Through collectively challenging the foundations of rape culture, we can all contribute to its dismantling and help create a society where rape and sexual violence are no longer normalised, tolerated, or enabled.
