Nadine Dorries and victim-blaming

Nadine Dorries MP was on the Vanessa (Feltz) show on Channel 5 today, discussing her abstinence education for girls bill. In the course of the conversation, Feltz raised the point that young girls are already taught to say no and have adults respect their personal space. In response, Dorries added

Well do you know that’s really interesting because one of the reasons for this is that some of the evidence that I’ve heard is that if a stronger just say no message was given to children in school that there might be an impact on sex abuse. Because a lot of girls, when sex abuse takes place, don’t realise until later that that was a wrong thing to do…

Society is so over-sexualised that I don’t think people realise that if we did empower this message into girls, imbued this message in schools, we’d probably have less sex abuse.”

The full clip can be seen on the Channel 5 website.

This view is nothing short of victim-blaming. Yet again Nadine Dorries seems to think that girls are the gatekeepers of morality and can control what happens to them and if they just said ‘no’ a sexual abuser would just stop. She discusses the abuse in terms of the girls not knowing it was ‘the wrong thing to do’ which implies a level of consent, as if the girls were engaging on sexual behaviour with their abuser. To be clear, this statement took place in reference to sex abuse specifically - not consensual (albeit young) sexual behaviour. Giving girls the message that what they did was wrong when being abused is the complete opposite of what these girls need to hear. Young victims of sex abuse should be reassured that regardless of whether they said no or tried to stop it, they have done nothing wrong. They frequently struggle with feelings of guilt as it is, as if they should have done something to stop it happening, or somehow invited the abuse. Dorries is just reinforcing this damaging viewpoint and with absolutely nothing to back it up except ‘some of the evidence that I’ve heard’.

I just really, really hope that young girls don’t hear or buy into this crap. Proper support can be found from groups like Childline or Mind (with thanks to DrPetra for the links).

Nadine Dorries can be contacted directly via her blog or you can complain directly to the Prime Minister via the Number10 website.