This Got Under My Skin.
Someone said it the way you say something you have never once examined. That women who dress revealingly are essentially asking for it. That it is a man’s natural instinct. That the responsibility sits with the woman.
I said a lot in the moment. It fired me up and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But after the conversation ended I kept thinking about it, not about what I said but about why someone arrives at that belief in the first place. Because I do understand it. When you grow up in a culture where this is the dominant framework, it does not feel like a belief. It feels like a fact. The inherited scorecard does not announce itself. It just runs. If that phrase is new to you, the full definition is here.
So I went looking for what the research actually says. The argument was already over. I went looking anyway, because I think it matters that it has an answer.
Is this belief universal? Is it even natural?
The short answer is no.
The idea that male sexual aggression is an inevitable response to female appearance is a culturally transmitted belief rather than an established biological fact. It is also worth noting what this belief does to men, because calling sexual aggression a natural male instinct does not protect them but reduces them to beings without agency, impulse control, or moral capacity. The men I know would find that offensive. Most men are not looking for permission to harm someone.
Research across anthropology, psychology, and public health points instead to the powerful role of social norms, gender inequality, and cultural expectations.
A landmark study by Sanday (1981) examined a large cross-cultural sample of traditional societies and found enormous variation in the prevalence of sexual violence. Some societies reported virtually no rape, while others reported much higher levels. That variation cannot be explained by biology alone and points strongly to the importance of cultural and social norms. Societies with higher levels of sexual violence tended to have more rigid gender hierarchies, greater acceptance of male dominance, and stronger expectations that masculinity should be expressed through aggression. Societies with lower levels tended to show greater gender equality and more collaborative forms of social organisation.
More recent research reaches similar conclusions. A study comparing matrilineal Garo communities with neighbouring patriarchal Bengali and Santal communities in Bangladesh found substantially lower levels of emotional, physical, and sexual violence against women in the matrilineal community. The researchers concluded that greater gender equality was strongly associated with lower levels of violence against women.
Cross-cultural researchers have also distinguished between what Sanday described as rape-prone and rape-free societies. While no society is literally free of sexual violence, the distinction highlights how dramatically rates vary according to cultural organisation, gender relations, and the social acceptance of violence.
Where is it highest? The statistics are more complicated than they look.
Global statistics on sexual violence require careful interpretation because police-recorded crime reflects more than the number of offences that occur. It is also shaped by legal definitions, reporting practices, police recording systems, and whether survivors feel safe enough to come forward.
Sweden, for example, has often appeared near the top of international rape statistics. Researchers generally attribute this to a combination of broader legal definitions, comprehensive recording practices, and comparatively high reporting rates rather than treating the figures as a straightforward measure of prevalence.
Switzerland also changed its legal definition of rape in 2023 by adopting a consent-based standard. Legal reforms like this can increase the number of recorded offences because a wider range of conduct is recognised under the law.
At the other end of international comparisons, countries reporting very low numbers should not automatically be assumed to be the safest. In many places, legal barriers, social stigma, fear of retaliation, and limited confidence in the justice system discourage survivors from reporting sexual violence. Low recorded rates may therefore reflect under-reporting as much as lower prevalence.
Although no single global dataset can fully adjust for these reporting differences, evidence from the World Health Organisation, UN Women, and large population surveys points in the same direction. Violence against women is consistently more common where gender inequality is greater, legal protections are weaker, armed conflict is present, and women have less social and economic power.
UN Women estimates that around 51,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or other family members in 2023. The overall pattern is remarkably consistent. Where women have less power, fewer legal protections, and less freedom, they are generally at greater risk of violence. Clothing does not emerge as a meaningful explanatory factor in this body of research.
If sexual aggression were simply an unavoidable biological response to women’s appearance, we would expect rates of sexual violence to look broadly similar across societies. They do not.
What about the clothing argument specifically?
Research has not found evidence that a woman’s clothing predicts whether she will be sexually assaulted. Instead, studies consistently show that beliefs about clothing influence how observers judge victims rather than how assaults actually occur.
The vast majority of sexual violence is committed by someone the victim knows. Research by Bohner and colleagues, along with decades of work on rape myth acceptance, shows that beliefs such as “she was asking for it” increase victim blaming and reduce perceived responsibility for perpetrators. They do not explain why sexual violence occurs.
One widely known educational exhibit, What Were You Wearing?, illustrates this misconception by displaying the ordinary clothing survivors were wearing at the time they were assaulted. The clothes are ordinary. Jeans and school uniforms and pyjamas and a child’s dress.
Then, while I was still thinking about all of this, I saw something in the news that reminded me of what the research had already shown.
A woman in Feira de Santana, Bahia, filmed a man masturbating behind her while she was exercising on a treadmill in her condominium gym. According to CNN Brasil, the case is under police investigation as importunação sexual.
I found myself wondering what someone who believes clothing causes assault would ask first.
What was she wearing?
The article never suggested that it mattered.
What drew my attention instead was what happened afterwards. Someone identifying herself as the suspect’s mother contacted people on social media asking for the video to be removed. In the messages that circulated publicly, she acknowledged that her son had acted wrongly but focused primarily on the consequences for him and his family.
I cannot know what she was feeling and I am not interested in judging a mother’s private grief. What I can observe is something much broader. Our first instinct is often to centre the person who caused the harm rather than the person who experienced it. That instinct sits remarkably close to the belief that started this conversation.
The woman in the gym appeared to be wearing ordinary workout clothes. Yet even if she had not been, the question would remain exactly the same.
Would shorter clothes have made her responsible for someone else’s decision?
No.
And the fact that we still ask that question tells us far more about our culture than it does about women’s clothing.
So where does the belief come from?
This is where the inherited scorecard becomes visible.
Ideas about modesty, gender, and responsibility are learned long before we recognise them as beliefs. They are passed through families, communities, schools, religious traditions, and everyday conversations until they begin to feel like common sense.
Cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand describes some societies as tighter cultures, meaning they have stronger social norms and lower tolerance for behaviours seen as deviant. In some of these cultures, expectations surrounding gender roles and modesty are enforced more strongly than in others.
That does not mean every person raised in a tight culture believes women are responsible for male behaviour. Nor does it mean every loose culture has solved violence against women.
It does help explain why certain beliefs can feel unquestionably true to the people who inherit them.
Understanding where a belief comes from is not the same as accepting that it is correct.
What I actually think:
I think the belief that a woman’s clothing determines what happens to her was built to protect a particular social order, not to protect women. It places responsibility for male behaviour onto female appearance, reducing accountability for the person who chose to cause harm.
I also think it is worth saying clearly that this belief is not supported by the evidence. Cross-cultural anthropology does not support it. Public health research does not support it. Decades of research on sexual violence and rape myths do not support it.
What supports it is repetition.
The inherited scorecard works because it tells us something so often, and from so many directions, that we eventually stop asking whether it is true.
Questioning an inherited belief is uncomfortable, but leaving it unexamined has a cost too, and that cost is paid by the people the belief was never designed to protect.
The clothing argument is not just unsupported by evidence. It is a mechanism that shifts accountability away from the person who chose to cause harm and onto the person who had no choice in what happened to them.
One last thing. You might be wondering why I am saying this here, publicly, on a blog about identity and parenting and moving between countries.
Because moving between cultures is often what makes the scorecard visible in the first place. When everyone around you runs the same inherited beliefs, those beliefs feel like facts. They do not announce themselves as cultural. They simply feel like how things are. It is only when you cross into a context that does not share them that you feel the friction. That friction is uncomfortable. It is also, I have come to think, one of the most clarifying experiences available to a human being.
The person who has never left their home culture may never notice the scorecard running. The person who has crossed enough borders usually cannot stop noticing it. That is the gift and the cost of identity migration. You lose the comfort of inherited certainty and gain the ability to ask whether it was true.
The inherited scorecard does not run because nobody noticed but because it was convenient for someone that it kept running.
Sometimes when you swim against the tide you feel it most in the resistance. That resistance is not a sign you are going the wrong way. It is a sign the current was real.
Naming it is the first step to stopping it.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
Further Reading
Sanday, P. R. (1981). The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study. Journal of Social Issues.
Bohner, G., Eyssel, F., Pina, A., Siebler, F., & Viki, G. T. (2009). Rape Myth Acceptance. In Rape: Challenging Contemporary Thinking.
Burt, M. R. (1980). Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Gelfand, M. J., et al. (2011). Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures. Science.
Islam, T. M., et al. (2021). Gender Differences in Marital Violence: A Cross-Ethnic Study among Bengali, Garo, and Santal Communities in Rural Bangladesh. PLOS ONE.
UN Women. Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women.
