A Skirt of One’s Own

What decades of offender research say about clothes, blame, and who really gets targeted

“Law & Order: Special Victims’ Wardrobe”, written and illustrated by author

For the past few days I’ve been escaping the Greek heat in northern Wales with my friend and some of her family. Last week I was with my friend and her mother outside of a school, at the time when the children were leaving for the day, and we watched as they walked to the bus station in their school uniforms, which was, scientifically speaking, hella cute. One of the girls, couldn’t have been more than fifteen, had paired her white button down, sweater, and tie with a particularly short grey pleated skirt. That caused my friend’s mum to make a comment I have not been able to stop thinking about since. “If somebody rapes her it would be their fault,” she said in a mocking tone, implying the opposite, to which my friend and I honestly answered “yes.” After some back and forth, that sixty-year-old woman looked us in the eyes and said the blame is split fifty-fifty. Half the responsibility for a hypothetical crime, assigned in advance, to a child who had done nothing except exist in a skirt that met her own school’s dress code.

Now, if I were a violent person, I would have punched her in the face and told her it was fifty percent her fault for the things she was saying. I did not. If I were a rude person, I would have said her hatred for that girl had something to do with the girl being young and beautiful, and her being neither. I did not do that either. Because I am neither rude nor violent. I am a social scientist, so instead I did what social scientists do when someone hands them a claim dressed up as common sense. I went and checked it.

Here is what the people who actually study offenders have found, the ones who sit incarcerated rapists down and ask them how they picked their victims. It is not skirts. In one study of sixty-one men in a maximum security prison, the pattern that emerged was rational and cold: offenders chose targets they believed were vulnerable, meaning unlikely to fight back or be believed afterward (Stevens, 1994). Sixty-six percent of them said as much outright. And what made a victim look vulnerable, more than anything else, was her age. Younger women were judged more exploitable, not more provocatively dressed. Nobody in these transcripts does math on hemlines. They do math on isolation, on access, on whether anyone would notice.

Which brings us back to the girl in the grey pleated skirt. She was not standing alone in a car park at midnight. She was walking to a bus stop with a hundred other children in identical uniforms, in broad daylight, with adults nearby who apparently had a great deal to say about her wardrobe. By offender logic rather than tabloid logic, she was about as low-risk a target as a person can be. The people who actually rape children are overwhelmingly not strangers assessing skirts from across a road. Of juvenile victims in cases reported to law enforcement, ninety-three percent knew their attacker: fifty-nine percent acquaintances, thirty-four percent family (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). The threat was never the skirt. Statistically, it was more likely sitting at her dinner table.

So why does a sixty-year-old woman look at a child in uniform and reach for the hemline as her explanation? Because there’s a documented reflex that does exactly this, and it’s been measured directly. In one study, subjects read an identical account of an acquaintance rape and were shown a photo of the same woman in a short, moderate, or long skirt. The skirt length alone shifted how much blame people assigned her (Workman & Orr, 1996). Nothing about the assault changed. Only the fabric did. The researchers were blunt about what that means: a victim’s clothing has no business being treated as evidence, because it measures the observer’s appetite for believing the world is fair, not anything the offender was thinking about.

That appetite has a name. Psychologists call it just world thinking: the comforting idea that bad things only happen to people who did something to invite them, because the alternative, that any of us could be assaulted regardless of what we wore or how carefully we behaved, is unbearable to sit with for very long. Blaming the skirt was never really an argument about skirts. It’s a hedge against the possibility that safety was never really anyone’s to control in the first place.

I’ll admit that after reading all of that, even I found myself asking whether a skirt is relevant in a narrower sense, seeing as it’s more accessible than, say, jeans, which seems to feed right into the vulnerability that opportunistic offenders look for. That led me to a sharper question: does a short skirt make an assault physically easier, fewer buttons, faster access, less friction? I went looking for that specific claim in the offender literature and came back empty-handed. What gets measured, again and again, is opportunity in the sense of isolation, timing, and existing relationship to the victim. Garment type as its own variable, tested against actual outcomes, does not appear to have been measured anywhere. The honest answer is that nobody has done the science to say yes or no to my own question, which is a strange gap to find sitting under such a confidently repeated claim.

There’s one more argument I owe some fairness, because I’d rather be right than comfortable. I’ve always believed rape is a violent act like any other, with little to do with sex itself. But if I’m willing to interrogate the “short skirt” argument, I have to hold the “power, not sex” framing to the same standard. A widely cited 2011 review of four decades of research on the subject concluded that sexual gratification remains rapists’ most common motive, even where anger or dominance are also present (Bryden & Grier, 2011). I bring this up because an argument that oversells its own certainty is exactly the argument that gets picked apart in a comment section, and I’d rather leave that woman nothing to grab onto.

None of which changes the arithmetic she offered outside that school. Fifty percent, for the crime of existing in a skirt. The data says the offender was never measuring her hemline. He was measuring how alone she was, how young she looked, and how likely anyone would be to believe her afterward. So no, the skirt doesn’t get fifty percent. It doesn’t get any percent. It was just a bystander, blamed because blaming it was easier than admitting that nobody was ever safe by choice.

Photo by Jack Prommel on Unsplash

Somewhere between one in six and one in three rapes ever gets reported to police, and when survivors are asked why they stayed quiet, self-blame and fear of being blamed sit right at the top of the list, ahead of almost everything else. That woman outside the school wasn’t describing the world. She was building it. Every time someone says fifty percent, a girl somewhere hears it and decides to say nothing at all.

For stats and facts about how common sexual assault is see: On Wednesdays We Wear Shame

References

Stevens, D. J. (1994). Predatory rapists and victim selection techniques. The Social Science Journal, 31(4), 421–433. https://doi.org/10.1016/0362-3319(94)90033-7

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2000). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: Victim, incident, and offender characteristics.

Workman, J. E., & Orr, R. L. (1996). Clothing, sex of subject, and rape myth acceptance as factors affecting attributions about an incident of acquaintance rape. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 14(4), 276–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0887302X9601400407

Bryden, D. P., & Grier, M. M. (2011). The search for rapists’ “real” motives. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973–), 101(1), 171–278. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23074037