‘How to rape a woman’: People searching for rape porn end up on sexual abuse investigation website
Director of Women Under Seige project reveals list of most shocking search terms which bring suspected rapists and fantasists to its site
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Your support makes all the difference.An organisation which investigates sexual abuse of women has discovered that a large number of the visitors to its website appear to be arriving looking for porn or advice on “how to rape women”.
The director of Women Under Siege was able to look at the search terms used by people coming to the site, and has revealed for the first time the shocking list of Google searches through which rapists and rape fantasists end up finding their articles.
Lauren Wolfe, the journalist who runs Women Under Siege, said she was investigating how people came to read a recent piece entitled “Women in South Africa are living in a war zone”.
Wolfe explained that while she was sometimes saddened by search terms like “are women to blame for rape?”, she was forced to re-evaluate what she was doing altogether when she found “a far darker kind of search”.
The former Guardian and Atlantic journalist has now published a list of the disturbing words used.
Wolfe wrote: “I realized it was time to share what else people around the world have been searching for before they (likely unassumingly) land on a journalism project about sexualized violence instead of a porn site.
“What matters, I think, is that this is what is in so many people’s minds on a daily basis—these are things they can contain only to the point of seeking more information on the Internet. Barely contained ideas or impulses, basically.”
Women Under Siege is a project run by the Women’s Media Center, investigating how sexual violence is used as a tool in conflicts around the world.
One reader responded to Wolfe saying: “I have a few similar terms on my blog. It's horrible.” Another said: “This just makes me sad.”
Wolfe wrote about people arriving at her site while searching for porn in a blog post here.