Full-page ad calls on prominent Dutch lawyer to stop blaming women for getting raped
“Dear Gerard, it is not the women’s fault.” With this full-page advertisement in the AD newspaper, the makers urge prominent criminal lawyer Gerard Spong to stop victim blaming after he said in a documentary that fewer women would be raped if they were more resilient. The makers are dumbfounded that such a prominent person in the legal chain still thinks women should be responsible for the actions of men.
In the documentary Blauwe Ballen en andere verkrachtingsmythes by Sunny Bergman, Spong said that “women are quick to let themselves be raped. They quickly give up their resistance. I have the idea that a well-resilient woman will drastically reduce the number of rapes.”
The advertisement includes a QR code, which links to the initiators’ website, where call Spong’s statements “the ultimate form of victim blaming” - inferring that it is women’s repsonsibility to stop men raping them. Instead of men’s responsibility to not rape anyone.
“These kinds of statements are very damaging to victims of sexual violence. It is not women who should arm themselves and ‘prepare’ even more (they have been doing that for centuries), but men who have the responsibility to think about consent as soon as they want to have a sexual interaction with someone else,” the initiators write. They funded the ad with over 1,400 donations.
Sexual health consultant Marieke van der Sanden, one of the initiators, told NOS that she was “dumbfounded” by Spong’s statements. The lawyer prompted the ad, but it is a reminder to everyone in the Netherlands, she said. “And also to support all victims who experienced this as a punch in the stomach.”
The idea for the ad came from an earlier advertisement in the same newspaper three years ago, when John de Mol complained that “women do not quickly report these kinds of things” after the sexual misconduct scandal at The Voice of Holland. Talpa employees responded with an ad pointing out to him that it is not the women’s behavior that’s the problem.
When seeing Spong’s statement, Van der Sanden immediately thought of that advertisement, she told NOS. “I thought: haven’t we learned anything? There may now be people who think: ‘he’s a lawyer, he may know what he’s talking about.’ This is really so damaging for all victims of sexual violence.”
Spong told AD that he would respond to the advertisement at a later time.
