feature: activist amber amour shares live account of her rape on instagram

During a trip to promote her #Stop Rape. Educate campaign in Cape Town, South Africa, New York-based activist, Amber Amour, was sexually assaulted. What began as a consul shower ended as violent rape.

Moments after the assault, still on the bathroom floor, Amour took to Instagram to document what had happened. “Here I was, telling survivors every single day that they should speak up… I knew I had to practice what I preached,” she told Marie Clare UK. “So the first thing I did was take a picture and write a post, describing what had happened. It was almost an intuitive thing,” she added. “I was still in the bathroom – in the crime scene. I don’t even think I’d stood up. I just typed and typed.”

In typical rape culture fashion, commenters rationalized Amour’s rape by suggesting that agreeing to a shower was, also, agreeing to be raped. Comments like “Why’d you get in the shower in the first place?” “…could have been avoided. She was very naive” not only perpetuates the very misguided and flat-out wrong idea that women are in any way copiable for violations of their bodies. That, by agreeing to any type of intimacy, women forfeit the right to control what happens to them. Rape apologist comments like, but not limited to, these ones also imply that you should expect men to be rapists.

“No matter what a person does, it is not an invitation for rape. It doesn’t matter if I kissed him. It doesn’t matter if he was drunk. It doesn’t matter if I said yes to a shower. I never said he could get violent with me. I never said he could make me bleed. I never said he could rape me. But still, that’s how the scene went down.”

Let me be as clear as possible:
No one is entitled to anyone else’s body. Ever.
There is no circumstance in which one action is an invitation for rape.
Consent can be revoked at ANY time.
Changing your mind is okay.
Refusing to accept someone’s mind-change is 100% not okay.

Story from The Grio.

By Erin White, AFROPUNK contributor

Photo from Instagram

http://www.stoprapeeducate.org/
https://www.facebook.com/loveamberamour/