Consent, Responsibility and the Conversation Tipperary Needs to Have.
New research from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre should prompt a serious conversation about attitudes to rape, consent and responsibility in Ireland.
According to its latest national survey, 15% of adults believe that someone raped, while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, is at least partly responsible for what happened to them.
Among men under 25 years, that figure rises sharply to 37%. Among women under 25 years, it is 25%.
The wider findings are equally concerning. Almost half of men under 25 years surveyed believe there are “a lot” of false rape allegations, while roughly one in three say a rape should not be believed without either a criminal conviction or a report to Gardaí.
These attitudes matter because sexual violence does not always result in an immediate report, prosecution or conviction. The same research found that among people who had experienced rape, only 17% reported it to Gardaí, while 19% told nobody at all.
Alcohol or drug use does not transfer responsibility for rape from the perpetrator to the victim. Consent must still be freely given, and a person’s vulnerability is never permission for another person to violate them.
But simply condemning young people who hold these views will not solve the problem either.
We need to understand where these beliefs are coming from; what young people are learning about sex and consent, what they are seeing online, how pornography, peer culture and social media may shape expectations, and whether our education system is giving young people the tools to recognise healthy sexual relationships and boundaries.
The encouraging finding is that 88% of adults agree that a perpetrator who is intoxicated should remain just as responsible for their actions.
That principle should be equally clear on the other side of the equation; being intoxicated does not make a victim responsible for somebody else’s decision to commit sexual violence.
Education about consent cannot be a one-off classroom lesson. It needs to involve families, schools, universities, sporting organisations, online platforms and, importantly, men speaking with other men.
Changing attitudes is part of preventing harm and the starting point should be simple; responsibility for rape lies with the person who commits it, not with the person who experiences it.
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