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The rhythm is infectious, the crowd of women exuberant as they pump their fists and move their feet. Their voices rise as they chant the chorus line, translated from the song’s original Spanish: “It wasn’t my fault; not where I was, not how I dressed.” How many women wouldn’t guess, from those words alone, that this is about rape? And it is that visceral, shared understanding that has helped a song and dance, devised by a little-known Chilean feminist collective called Las Tesis, spread across the globe. Since November, Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) has been sung everywhere from France and Mexico to Kenya and India as a protest against the systemic use of sexual violence to repress women. Most recently, it was performed outside the New York courtroom where Harvey Weinstein is on trial for rape.
Like the pink pussy hats or The Handmaid’s Tale-style scarlet cloaks adopted by other feminist protesters, the spectacle is easy to copy and highly shareable on social media. But its real power lies in how it feels, not how it looks.
There were some tears afterwards,” says Zakiyah Ansari, the advocacy director for a US education charity, who performed it outside the Weinstein courtroom and Trump Tower. “It could make you think about a past experience, but in the moment there was such power. It’s exhilarating – it’s like a moment of sadness and relief.” She thinks there is something particularly cathartic about the way the women move through the dance steps as one – hugging each other when it’s over – but also about the accusatory final lines: “The rapist is you!” The women yell it, often while pointing at a government building or courtroom. Or, as at Trump Tower, at the former home of a president himself accused of multiple sexual assaults.
The song’s message is that rape doesn’t happen in a political vacuum; that it is welded to patriarchal power structures as a means of keeping women down. The title mimics an old slogan portraying the police as “the friend in your path” and the lyrics describe systemic use of sexual and other violence by Chilean police. Even the dance steps tell a story: performers squat three times, representing the degrading position arrested women have allegedly been forced to adopt for body cavity searches, often while stripped naked.
It’s more like street theatre than a traditional political protest, and that’s the point, says Paula Soto of the British-based Assemblea Chilena En Londres, a Chilean solidarity group that, along with Venezuelan, Brazilian and Colombian groups in London, staged a performance of the song near Tower Bridge last month. To South American eyes, she explains, British political marches look bafflingly dull – “people just walking, and walking very slowly at that” – while in Chile, protest is more of a performance. “There’s a lot of music, and generally a lot of singing and movement. And the movements are always symbolic – when you’re shouting for something to fall, a woman will go down low.”
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