"Blame The Real Culprit" by Prudence Cheung

It was a normal day after school, and she had gone to the train station with her friends. 5 girls in a circle, they were just casually waiting for the train to arrive, and chatting about how one of them had been followed several times while heading home and what self-protection measures they should adopt if the situation calls for it. Ironically, during that conversation, a man approached from behind her. She had not realised what he was doing, until her friend chased after him and told her that he had been filming her under the dress. 

The week after that incident, she was told a lot of things. People were telling her there were perverts like that everywhere and that it was “common”. On the other hand, she only told the people who knew to never spread that around. There was a part inside of her that feared that people would start pointing fingers at her: had she wore her uniform in a more conservative manner; had she gone home with a boy; had she looked shabbier, that it would have never happened. 

It is rather “common”, yet again, that women in Hong Kong are labelled or criticised when unfortunate things happen to them. Simply put, they bear the roles of both the victim and the culprit. Offensive labels are thrown around so easily that girls like her are called a prostitute at the mere age of 12. It could be all sorts of reasons: her voice, her body shape, the way she presents herself with confidence, how sociable she is that she gets along with boys, you name it. What is baffling is that people who pin these labels on her are classmates who know of her: girls who should have known to empathise and boys who should have known the power of their words. How ugly does a world get that children learn to throw harassive names at another child, especially when they do not know them personally? How irresponsible are people with their words that they convince others to callously do the same? 

In my experience dealing with Hong Kong culture, I have never once heard a guy being characterised harrsively. Nor have I ever come across anyone who dealt with male traumatic experiences insensitively. It has always been women and girls. And it is enervating to see our odyssey to educate everyone who is on the Internet that a lot of our behaviours should be a thing of the past. The term “sex worker” was coined in 1978, and yet here we are, nearly half a century later, using one’s occupation as a tool to degrade females as if they are at our disposal. A Belgian exhibition that displayed rape victim’s clothings went viral back in 2018, and it is shown that even with the “safest” outfit, women go through more petrifying events that anyone could imagine. This very exhibition eptimoses that no one but the offender is to be blamed; however, reality proves that such a rudimentary concept seems to be impossible to grasp. 

In the foreseeable future, I hope to see current-bystanders making necessary intervention to stop any more senseless utterance from spreading around. I hope to never see another female suffering from such barbaric acts and bearing the weight of blame. The fatiguing fact is that with education of higher quality becoming more commonplace, the assurance of said students to present to be well-informed tends to depreciate. The root of the problem is that victims are told to avoid being involved in unfortunate incidents, rather than wrongdoers are told off to not put anyone in pain. Would you believe me if I told you that you can make a change, or possibly even put a stop to it? Start by fixating on overlooked details that we let slip out of our mouths, holding back a friend when they make a “mean joke”, and confronting the person who made an abusive statement. As straightforward as it may seem, this neglected solution that we let slide makes us a culprit ourselves. Would you throw away this key to change that lays upon our palms, or would you continue to withstand this brutality that we all go through? Can we not push the innocent up against the wall with the arms-crossed culprit standing not that far away?