Logic dictates that the number of men in the world is somewhat equal to the number of women. In the United States, this is skewed; there are quite a few more women than men. Of these women, one in four have been or will be the victim of sexual assault. One in four; I want you to think about that statistic for a minute. That’s 25 percent, a quarter of a dollar, a fourth of a pie; that means that overall our sexual violence prevention score is, depending on your grading scale, an F.
According to the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, one in four women in the United States has been or will be a victim of sexual assault in this country. As an American woman, that number is pretty terrifying, but as the stats go on, they get worse. Twenty five percent of women in the U.S. become victims of sexual assault, and only about a third are attacked by a stranger. Over half of all of these attacks are never reported to the police and of those that are, 97 percent of rapists will never see any jail time.
It’s not difficult to see why victims would not want to report their assaults to the police. Think about it – the majority of assailants are known to the victims, and we live in a society that is very good at victim blaming.
People talking about the cases big enough to make national attention have all sorts of gems to excuse the heinous action. There’s the classic “Well, she shouldn’t have been at the party,” or “I wonder what she was wearing, people should be more aware of what they leave the house in.” There’s the classic politician approach: “Well I bet she consented and then changed her mind.” My personal favorite is the “Well, she shouldn’t have gotten drunk” approach. Because for some reason, it seems to be ingrained in the collected consciousness of the people that drunkenness puts the victim at fault while excusing the assailant.
This sort of apologist culture was very, very apparent during the Steubenville, Ohio trials. Two football players were convicted of raping a girl who – in a video taken shortly after – they refer to as “dead girl” because she was unresponsive and unable to move. People were very sympathetic … to the rapists. Meanwhile, the victim is still getting harassed in school and online for getting the boys in trouble and being told she deserved it because she was drunk.
To far too many people, her being drunk means that she holds responsibility for being raped, but the boys’ being drunk excuses their responsibility for raping her. That was what the general message going out to the public was. Yeah, it’s not really a surprise that over half of these attacks never get reported. By looking at the media one would think that we don’t care at all about protecting our citizens from being violated. If you’re sitting at home as one of the one in four and you see the reaction to this, would you want to put yourself out there? We need to change, as a society we need to start making an effort to protect our people. One in four women will be the victims of sexual assault, and according to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, one in six women will be the victims of rape specifically, not to mention one in 33 men. We need to start looking out for all of these victims.
No means no, stop means stop, rape is rape, drunkenness is not consent; also – when a victim is passed out or so far gone that she can’t respond or speak at all, you can safely assume that means no. Nobody deserves to be raped. Rapists deserve to be punished, and victims do not deserve to get bullied for being victims of assault. Don’t blame the victim, and don’t rape anyone.