Rape, as a crime, is widely deplored. Society and media condemn rapists, and rape and other sexually-related crimes carry potentially heavy prison sentences when perpetrators are convicted. So why, given this apparent intolerance for rape, do criminologists like me (and many others) still say that we live in a “rape culture”?

Rape culture is a term used to describe societies that accept rape and sexual violence. It is defined as a “set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and support violence against women”. It is a society where violence against women is often seen as sexy and therefore ignored, accepted or dismissed as a joke.

In the UK, this manifests in several ways. We see rape culture in the normalisation of sexual violence in schools, in suggestions that victims “must share some of the blame” for their own rape, and in violence against women dismissed as “pranks” in family courts. It is also expressed in rape myths (such as “men can’t be raped”) and in victim-blaming (“she was asking for it because of how she was dressed”).

Rape culture normalises acts of sexual violence........

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