Tide turns on sexism in 2012

Protestors who spilled on to the streets in New Delhi London – Caroline Kent 2012 is being billed by numerous media outlets as “the year that sexism became OK”. From the hideous gang-rape of a 23 year old woman in India to comments made by male Republican lawmakers in the US about women's bodies

, health and reproductive rights, 2012 has paved a rocky road for womankind to walk. However, women’s rights activists are imploring that it is not these incidents that 2012 should be remembered for. Instead we should think of the thousands upon thousands of protestors who spilled on to the streets in New Delhi demanding that rapes be dealt with appropriately by police, that victims not be blamed, that convictions be concluded, and that women be entitled to walk the streets without the constant threat of sexual violence.
We should think of Obama, who responded to Todd Aiken’s wildly inaccurate remarks (“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down”) by protecting women’s health care and preventing health insurance companies from charging women more for coverage.
We should think of the home-grown social media initiatives that support women through accessible and organic means, for example the twitter account of Everyday Sexism (@everydaysexism) and the launch of ‘Not Your Baby’, a free iPhone app developed by the Toronto-based Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women, who hope its invention will offer virtual support to thousands of women worldwide. The app allows users to input where they are – work, school, home, social setting or on the street – and who is sexually harassing or assaulting them. For example if the user selects “boss” as the offender and the location as “social situation” the app suggests: “Get a trusted person outside of the workplace to call you every so often and check to see how you’re doing.” It’s a form of virtual crowd-sourcing used to help women avoid being forced in to situations that may escalate beyond their control.
However, campaigners confirmed that we still have a long way to go towards providing the systematic support of women in society. Only a few weeks ago a court in the UK told a 49 year old male rapist, “She [the victim] let herself down badly.” Meanwhile Morocco is in the wake of what is being described as a “recurring phenomenon” of school girls being coerced and taped having sex with professors before their families are blackmailed.
In response, a new wave experts and members of the public are widely condemning victim-blaming, a phenomenon that Christina Diamandopoulos of the charity Rape Crisis describes as the “myth that women are responsible for men’s sexual behaviour. From this stems the idea that what a woman wears, says, where she goes, or what she does can make her responsible for the crime committed against her.”
Jacqui Hunt, of Equality Now, told Everyday Sexism: “We absorb messages from all around us every day, so what some might dismiss as harmless banter takes on a completely different quality when it forms part of a general culture of demeaning, pejorative and prejudicial reporting on women.” Holly Dustin, director of the UK’s End Violence Against Women Coalition, agrees: “While the law on rape and sexual consent is clear, some of our politicians and other leaders seem to have failed to notice the progress that’s been made. But the scale of revelations about abuse of women and girls in the Jimmy Saville case in the UK may have begun to turn the tide.”