Newspaper editorials are responding today to a study released yesterday indicating that a majority of British women believe that some rape victims – especially those who dress provocatively or go home with a man – should take responsibility for what happened to them.

The study, conducted for sexual assault awareness group, The Havens (incidentally, virtually all of the reporting on this story incorrectly identified the group as “Haven”), nearly a fifth of all respondents said that most claims of rape are “probably not true”, with men twice as likely as women to take that opinion. And more than half said that there are some circumstances in which the victim should take responsibility for the rape, including drinking to excess, getting in bed with the person, or even dressing provocatively. Women, the report found, were less forgiving than men, finding in more instances that the victim should take responsibility in certain situations.

The report also found that more than a third of Londoners have been forced to have sex when they didn’t want to.

The Telegraph editorialised today that rape is never ambiguous, always wrong, and never the fault of the victim (brave stance, that). “These are depressing findings,” the paper wrote. “There is never an excuse for violently forcing sex on another; the fact that so many women think there is suggests a drastic redrawing of moral boundaries – and this attitude is not confined to women.”

Tom Sutcliffe, writing in The Indpendent (which seems to be the place for slightly outré or contrarian op-eds these days), however, wrote that The Havens’s figures might not as clear-cut as all that.

“Quite a few women felt that some victims should take some responsibility for what happened, which may be a very long way indeed from saying that any kind of behaviour is a green light for violent sexual assault,” he wrote. “You’d have to look at the exact wording of the questions. I have a feeling that if you asked a question such as, ‘Are there circumstances in which it is reasonable to force a woman to have sex against her will?’, you would find very little equivocation in the responses.”

Sutcliffe goes on: “[T]here is another possible explanation for the apparent hardening of attitudes towards victims which would see it as a direct consequence of women’s increased equality, rather than a failure of such ideas to take root.” Sutcliffe wrote that now, as opposed to 50 years ago, sex is something that women do with men, not that men to do women. Younger women might not be self-hating or self-stigmatising, as the analysis of the report seems to indicate, but rather “may just be assuming they move through a complicated world as responsible adults – on a level with men.”

Sutcliffe makes an interesting, if slightly ideologically abstract point – but the fact remains that women are still far more likely to be raped than men, indicating that while the balance of power might be tipping, it’s not tipping all that much.

Obliquely, Sutcliffe acknowledges that point. More troubling than the response of women in the study, Sutcliffe wrote, was the response of the men interviewed: “Women are entitled to take the view, in the abstract, that their behaviour might contribute to tip an evening the wrong way. Men, I would suggest, are not.”

The news media response to the study was swift and, it seems, appropriately horrified. But what seems to be more interesting it the response of readers.

The Daily Mail ran a first-person account by Radio 4’s Jenni Murray, who wrote about how she, as a 19-year-old, went out in a short skirt with friends one evening, had some drinks and went home with an older man. The man raped her. She never reported it to the police, fearing reprisals and lack of sympathy. Reader response to the story was strong – out of hundreds of comments, most agreed with the writer that no one deserves to be raped, regardless of what they’re wearing or how much they’re drinking. But some seemed to imply that the writer was just seeking attention, or that she had in fact deserved what happened to her. One commenter, who also made fun of the writer’s clothing in her author picture, compared her walking around in a short skirt to him walking around a bad neighbourhood with £20,000 hanging out of his back pocket.

While comparing rape to being pick-pocketed is just offensive, The Mail itself isn’t exactly blameless in fostering a complex around rape reporting: The paper also lead with a story about a girl who cried rape and “walked free”. The paper wrote that “bisexual Sarah-Jane Hilliard” “seduced” a man, “dragged” him into a public toilet, and then claimed he’d raped her in an attempt to get compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. Hilliard, 20, received a suspended sentence, to the horror of the man she’d claimed raped her – and to The Daily Mail, it seemed. From the tone and the headline – bearing in mind that this is The Daily Mail we’re talking about – it was clear that the paper felt she had been let off too easy.

Rape of Prosperina, by Rembrandt