Do you close your front door at night?

You shouldn't have to. But you should do so, anyway. You should probably lock it, too. If you leave your front door standing open and your house is burglarized, you're not likely to receive overwhelming sympathy. You're more likely to be asked "Why didn't you close your front door?" Similarly, if you leave the key in your car's ignition, with the motor running and the doors unlocked, and someone steals your car, people will probably tell you that you were asking for it to be stolen. Yes - you should be able to leave your car running, but doing so isn't wise.

Yet somehow this all gets lost when the understandably emotional crime of rape is being discussed. Yes, we should be able to walk wherever we want, whenever we want, wearing whatever we want, even if it's a leisurely stroll through the deserted industrial quarter at two in the morning, and we're wearing only just enough to avoid being fined for public indecency. But we'd be unwise to do so.

The nature of rape is that two people are involved - an attacker and a victim. And by definition, the victim is overpowered - the victim is an unwilling participant. In some cases this is astonishingly evident - the victim whose house is broken into is raped in what should be the safest of all locations. Weight and strength differences, or the presence of a weapon, can also severely reduce a victim's options for avoiding the attack.

But many cases are not as clear as those described above, so to reflexively resent any blaming of the victim does all of us a disservice. For the victim, it suggests that there is no way to reduce the possibility of a future attack. It also denies that victim the possibility of self-determination, which only underscores the nature of the rape itself. The same is true for potential future victims - in other words, for everyone, because rape isn't restricted to heterosexual interactions, nor are women the only victims.

None of this is meant to say that rapists should not be held accountable for their actions. My only message is that stopping rape, or even reducing its frequency, requires work to be done on both the attacker's motivations, and on the victim's strategies.