Written by Amy Yasmin Roslan
“Unconvinced? Try this anti-double-think exercise. State three objective realities in a row:
A rape joke is not a rape.
A dead baby joke is not a dead baby.
A joke about the Holocaust is not a Holocaust.
Feeling any better?”
(Arlott , 2014)
If you’re an avid Twitter user, you would know that recently a Malaysian female college student disclosed WhatsApp group chats own by a group of male students. The WhatsApp group was used to criticise her and the other new intake of female students. The conversation becomes extreme when one of them stated that he wants to rape her and force her to marry him, which later he claimed was a joke.
The existence of free speech should not be misused by an individual to mask their sick attitudes after saying something awful and insulting. Rape jokes are not funny. It might be funny when it happens to strangers but not when it happens to your family members. Every woman, man even transgender should be given the freedom to walk on the surface of this earth without the fear of someone is going to rape them.
Rape is non-consensual intercourse that violates the victims’ right over their own bodies. Rape is so horrible that some of the victims experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By joking about rape, we trivialise it thus making actual rape victims less willing to come out about their experiences (Azlan, 2017). Orange County Rape Crisis Center (2016), reported that not only rape jokes offend survivors and their allies, they validate rapists in their behaviour and thinking.