All about #ThisIsNotConsent

Women all across the world, particularly in Ireland, have been posting pictures of their thongs and captioning the image with the caption #ThisIsNotConsent. Why are they doing so, you ask? Here’s why.

This particular hashtag has been headlining due to the fact that women have been posting it in outrage over the acquittal of a 27-year-old man in Ireland who was accused of rape. He was acquitted because the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old girl, was wearing a thong at the time of the incident. According to the South China Morning Post, the victim was raped by a 27-year-old man whom she met outside a club. She was allegedly dragged and raped even after repeatedly telling the man to stop. Two eyewitnesses were present and also testified in court on behalf of the young teenager.

The hashtag and campaign were created by a Facebook group known as “Women of Ireland”. The pictures of thongs and the caption which accompanied them were supposed to signify that the clothes or undergarments that one chose to wear didn’t define or constitute one’s consent.

The trial and its proceedings were murky from the beginning. The defendant claimed that the intercourse between the two was consensual, and in fact, was initiated by the teenage girl. The issue from the very beginning was whether or not the accused had been given consent to engage in intercourse. The defendant’s lawyer used the clothes that the teenager was wearing as a key foundation of her argument in favor of the accused.

The lawyer’s comments received a lot of backlash and criticism from women’s rights groups. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said that it wished that lawyers would be banned from commenting on the clothes of the accused, or even the accuser. Minister of Parliament, Ruth Coppinger, displayed her own pair of underwear in the Irish parliament in support of the seventeen-year-old girl.

Protests regarding the court verdict have been taking place all over Ireland in Galway, Limerick, Dublin, and Cork.

This incident is a classic case of the court failing the people that it is supposed to work for. The undergarments of a victim can’t be used as proof to reach a conclusion on a case as serious as one involving rape. Flimsy grounds such as these are simply unacceptable to dismiss a case.