Senior lawmakers in Australia, powerful professors at France’s Sciences-Po college and elite schools in Britain have all recently been accused of failing to deal with rape and sexual misconduct. In the face of those issues, talk of “rape culture” (the normalisation of rape and sexual violence) has provided a hard-hitting way of calling out the powerful.
This reckoning isn’t the first, however. Looking back to the Me Too movement, slutwalks of the 2010s and longstanding efforts by feminist campaigners to highlight male violence, it feels like exposing misconduct isn’t bringing down structures of abuse and impunity fast enough.