By: Zoe Strickland Staff Writer
Recently, a lot of my classes have started talking about rape culture. Being a gender studies minor, this isn’t anything new. My classes have specifically been talking about how, when dealing with rape culture, we often teach people how to not get raped instead of teaching other people to just not rape. Buckle up and prepare to listen, because this stuff is serious.
Not trying to solve the problem at the root sounds crazy and completely unreasonable, right? I think so.
Why is it that we teach children to always walk in groups, instead of teaching them about what consent is? Why do we tell girls in college to walk with their keys carefully positioned in between their fingers, instead of teaching people in college that you can’t actually consent to something if you’re under the influence of any drugs or alcohol? Why is it that even after doing all of these studies showing that sex education is important to preventing sexual assault, schools across the country still push abstinence-only education? It’s absurd.
I’ve taken multiple classes on the Western campus wherein rape culture is discussed. I’ve sat through throngs of students in various sexuality and gender classes wherein we’ve talked about how society has uniformly taught women to be afraid of getting raped and has taught men that they should be feared for potentially having the power to rape. In these classes, it goes without saying that every student found the “teach women how not to get raped” method upsetting. So, if so many people find this upsetting, why haven’t we made more strides in fixing it?
A fundamental component of this discussion is believing victims/survivors of sexual assault. I swear, if I have to sit through one more person mentioning how “sometimes people make it up,” I’m going to scream. Look at the statistics: only two to eight percent of reported sexual assaults are ruled out as being false reports. Why are we still doubting the believability of something if 98 percent of reports are true? Why aren’t we seeing how we can help people get through the traumatic event that they’ve just experienced?
These things are serious. Instead of people being afraid to walk around alone because something might happen to them, we need to start teaching personal boundaries and the meaning of consent at a young age. Young people aren’t too young to grasp the basic concept of human decency.
Contact the author at zstrickland14@wou.edu or on Twitter @nwpmagazine.
