For rape culture to flourish, doubt, disbelief and degradation of victims and/or survivors must be the norm. In opposition to this, the phrase ‘believe survivors’ gained popularity, however, the question remains which survivors are we being called to believe?
As our sisters in the Black feminist Combahee River Collective have taught us, all systems of oppression are interlocking and interdependent. As such, white supremacy, queerphobia and transphobia are pervasive within rape culture and further skew who we believe to be real victims, real survivors.
The position of all victims as a disadvantaged group is further amplified when they hold places in multiple marginalised identities. People of colour (POC) and LGBTQ+ individuals are more likely to be exposed to stigmatisation, prejudice and discrimination, and the aid they have available following these instances is often in itself tinged with prejudice.
Where cisgender heterosexual white women may face gender discrimination and sexual violence, and could then report it to a human resources department, the police, her boss – these avenues are much less accessible for POC and LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly as they have historically faced institutional discrimination and power imbalances from the very people who are meant to aid them. Negative experience with the law, culture in the workplace, and lack of culturally competent resources are some of the reasons why POC and LGBTQ+ survivors feel that reporting sexual violence is not an option for them. The scale of this is oftentimes not fully comprehensible to cisgender heterosexual white people, and for POC and LGBTQ+ individuals, this leads to a different perception of their communities and the support they have available to them.
Push back against the doubt, disbelief and degradation of all victims and survivors.
When their positions as survivors and POC, or members of the LGBTQ+ community, (or both), overlap, it makes for an environment that is extremely isolating and unsupportive.
This isolation and lack of support is only furthered by the fact that the primary face of anti-sexual violence activism, in that those believed to be the primary victims and survivors of sexual violence, are cisgender heterosexual white women. We too often forget that sexual violence has long been used as a tool of colonial subjugation against non-white indigenous people.
We too often leave unaddressed the “curative” and punitive sexual violence faced by our queer and trans siblings. The fight against sexual violence and rape culture must be intersectional. We must move those at the margins to the centre as the Combahee River Collective and countless others have stated: once the most marginalised of us are free, then all of us will be free as all systems of oppression and their supporting ide-