There are forms of violence that are spoken of openly, and there are others that slip through like shadows. There are people that seek in substances a moment of relief, a pause from a world that suffocates them, an instant of freedom from the demands of survival. But in those same spaces, where consciousness softens and control loosens, patriarchy finds an opportunity, a crack, a fertile place to exercise its most silent violence.
When someone is intoxicated and their decision-making capacity is inhibited, the risk of sexual violence increases. It is a violence that occurs not just during intoxication, but through it, turning vulnerable bodies into available bodies.
When it comes to illicit drugs, prohibition and stigma force their use into the shadows. Substances are often consumed behind closed doors and or hidden corners of public spaces: bathrooms, back kitchens, alleyways, or homes. When consumption must be hidden, vulnerable bodies – and what happens to them – are hidden too.
This is a pattern that has long existed but is only starting to be named and backed up by research. One Spanish study highlighted that 37.9% of young people and 48.4% of women have experienced drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) at night, with most cases occurring in nightlife settings like parties and private social gatherings. A cross-European study found that 17% of women aged 18–27 have experienced DFSA. In Switzerland, a study found that in 63% of sexual violence cases, the victim had consumed alcohol or drug; in the United States, surveys estimate that 12% of women over 18 have experienced rape while incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.
Across literature (see, for example this review, this scoping analysis, this Brazilian study, and this clinical discussion) one finding is consistent: most assaults are opportunistic, taking advantage of reduced capacity to resist rather than involving force or covert drugging, and take place in contexts where substances are already present in social, intimate or familiar spaces. Studies suggest that more than 90% of victims know their attacker, and when the attacker is known, reporting plummets. Shame, self-blame linked to voluntary substance use (including fear of criminalisation), fear of retaliation, and social ties all contribute to this silence. The result is a structural underestimation of the phenomenon.
This issue recently came to the forefront, when civil society and the Latin American harm reduction movement were shaken when the director of the widely known Colombian harm reduction organisation Échele Cabeza was accused of DFSA at the organisation’s headquarters, a space used as a centre for activism, drug checking, and harm reduction. The case reverberated widely, with two other women coming forward with similar accusations, while more than 30 volunteers resigned in solidarity with the survivors.
DFSA is produced by three forces operating simultaneously: prohibition, patriarchy and the stigma that demonises substances and those who use them. These forces not only criminalise bodies, but also generate the grey zones where abuse becomes easier to commit and harder to name.
Stigma as a double punishment
In cases of DFSA , stigma acts as a double punishment that demonises people who use drugs, especially women and trans or gender-diverse people. The social narrative that equates an “intoxicated woman” with an “available woman” or a “guilty woman” is the direct product of a moralising patriarchy.
Research consistently shows that this double stigma, for being women and for being drug users, leads to shame, silence, and underreporting. When drugs are involved, there is an immediate disqualification of the victim. The moment a woman is perceived as intoxicated, she is moved outside the category of what society thinks is a “real victim”: rational, controlled, respectable, and innocent. Instead, she is repositioned as irresponsible, unreliable, and morally suspect.
So when sexual abuse occurs, the hegemonic story activates immediately: she asked for it; she allowed it; he misunderstood; we were both high; nobody can know what happened, or the worst: that’s what happens when you use drugs! In that prohibitionist-driven erasure, the violence becomes invisible, and often almost justified.
This stigma also actively shapes societal and institutional responses. When women fear not being believed, being judged, losing custody of children, or being denied care, many do not report violence or delay seeking help, reinforcing the invisibility of these experiences and allowing the impunity that fuels the repetition of these situations.
This is the result of a deeply embedded social logic in which women’s credibility is conditional. To be believed, women must perform a precise and unique script of victimhood: sober, cautious, resistant, and visibly violated. Drug and alcohol use, especially when voluntary, breaks that script. And once it is broken, the focus shifts away from the violence and toward the woman’s behaviour.
A tool of patriarchy
In this sense, substances function as a perfect tool of patriarchy. They allow society to reframe violence as ambiguity: Was she aware? Did she consent? Did she put herself in that situation? These questions do not emerge from uncertainty alone, but from a cultural framework that already assumes that intoxication equals diminished legitimacy.
This is not new. As Carol Pateman argued in The Sexual Contract in 1988, sexuality under patriarchy is never a neutral terrain. It is defined by a hidden “contract” over which men hold entitlement over women’s bodies.
When these hierarchies move into spaces of drug consumption, they intensify. Consent becomes a relative matter. It does not matter if the person is asleep, passed out, or unable to speak because, as Kate Manne explained in Down Girl, misogyny is not just about hatred, it is about enforcement. It polices women and feminised bodies into fulfilling what she describes as their socially assigned role: to be givers of care, attention, and sexual availability to men. Within this logic, those bodies are not fully treated as subjects with their own will, but as resources oriented toward male demand.
From that perspective, consent becomes irrelevant. What matters is not whether a woman wants, but whether she is positioned as someone whose body can be taken. So when a person is intoxicated, the absence of resistance is not read as a lack of consent; it is often interpreted, within the patriarchy frameworks, as accessibility.
In this context, drugs disinhibit patriarchy, not because the substance removes an aggressors’ inhibitions, but because our society has told him that his word will be believed over that of any woman or feminised body who has been consuming drugs. Abusers are not marginal figures, isolated subjects, or exceptional monsters. They are often men with a kind of social power that patriarchy recognizes and rewards: the successful one, the executive, the project leader, the one with “connections,” or the one who uses a superficial feminism as political camouflage.
To these men, patriarchy grants power. Prohibition provides the stage. Stigma provides the alibi. And their social power guarantees impunity.
Substances do not create violence
It is not the substances themselves that create violence. Drugs do not produce rapists, nor does temporary loss of consciousness produce abuse by itself. It is patriarchy that creates predators who take advantage of a system ripe for exploitation.
If we want to eradicate sexual violence, it is not enough to talk about consent. We must talk about power: who has it, how they use it and why this system continues to guarantee violence. We must also talk about vulnerability. When it comes to DFSA , the risk is produced by a system that stigmatises consumption, makes abuse invisible, protects aggressors, and shames victims into silence.
This is why the urgent call is to radically transform the structural conditions that allow this violence to exist, because there will be no feminist future, nor a future free of violence for women, trans people, and gender-diverse people, as long as patriarchy and prohibition continue setting the rules of the game.
