“We still persist in thinking that some women can’t be raped. Especially ‘bad’ women. If bad women are raped, it doesn’t fit our victim narrative, and so we’d rather ignore it. Or call it sex.”

The way we treat rape survivors also has to do with the way we imagine who gets raped and by whom. When women are raped, we ask them what they could have done to warrant such an action. What were they wearing? Why were they out so late? Were they drinking? We think the solution to rape is to lock up women, to teach girls to occupy as little space as possible, to not exercise their sexual freedom.

Sanjukta Bose writes about rape for Livewire, quoting from What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali. Read the article in full on Livewire now.