The Thing About Holding Female Perpetrators Accountable

The Thing About Holding Female Perpetrators Accountable

I’ve been talking about my experience with female perpetrated sexual violence since 2008. In the decades since I first broke my silence, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend whenever women – sorry – white women, are held accountable for perpetration.

Alleged allies are often quick to turn into skeptics, victim-shamers, victim-blamers and apologists the moment they find out that a perpetrator is a white woman. Or they push the argument that until all guilty men are punished, whatever a (white) woman does is not as bad. This whataboutism is all over the discussions about convicted trafficker and rapist Ghislaine Maxwell.

You know? We can actually see that shit. Really. We can.

Ya’ll have been all over my writings about my own experience as a male survivor of a (likely serial) female rapist since 2008. The whataboutism is almost a pathological impulse at this point.

Unsurprisingly, when a woman of color is implicated, there is no outrage from these same white feminists regarding their arrest or sentencing. Where was the whataboutism for Ciera Ross? Or Chantae Marie Gilman? Nowhere. They aren’t white. The “what about male perps” crowd must have been busy those days.

Ya’ll need to do better. So much better.