Last week was incredibly tiring, from the amount of class work looming over my head to endless fun times at my reach. However, the conversation I had with Kate Harding, set the pace for the week. Regardless the all the things that I had to do, this week was one of consciousness.
The one thing I enjoy most about the dinner conversations in Rose is that they are always composed of people with varying backgrounds and knowledge on topics. I was sitting in a room with men who felt isolated from gender conversation, women of color who wanted to know more and with individuals who didn’t know what rape culture meant. And me, I was motivated by a recent statistics that heralded startling news that: black women on campus (approx. 4%) account for the majority of sexual assaults reported.
We began our talk with the basics: rape culture. In the simplest of terms, Kate described it as, ” a culture that protects the needs of the rapist more than the victims.” Protecting the rapist takes on many forms, which range for large acts to more nuanced. Rape culture also encompasses a general climate of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. Rape culture also is ignoring male rape victims.
The denial of rape culture is real. When college administrators across the country were asked if they believed sexual assault was an issue on college campuses, they were quick to say yes. However, when the question asked if sexual assault was an issue on their own campus, the majority said now. This inability to see rape culture for what it is comes down to us not wanting to believe that the men that we know, love and trust could become mixed up in “toxic entitlement” and the objectification of women’s bodies.
Its time to get realistic about the situation. We continue to perpetuate a culture that sends the message that rapists can get away with this behavior. We need to stop asking questions which shift the blame on to the victim. Its time to start having conversations around sex positivity younger. College is too late to learn and fix this behavior. Its time for the Cornell Daily Sun to paint rapist as campus leaders with big futures. Its time we stop telling our victims that the should be ashamed and that they deserve no administrative support.
Its time we get realistic.
While I agree that we need to be realistic, I can understand that college administrators don’t want to readily admit that sexual assault is a problem on their own campus. This clearly isn’t a good attitude to have to combat sexual assault and help victims, I think there we need to do better about making sure that schools follow through. The number of reports does not make one campus safer than another. It should be how each case of sexual assault it handled. While I think a college should be proud to say that they properly handled a case, it is still hard for a lot of them to come to terms with the fact that they admitted a rapist in the first place.
(Note: my initial comment got the message “Sorry, your comment has been rejected because it contains one or more of the following words: r*pe. Please try posting your comment again, but without these words.” I don’t know who controls this, but not allowing rapeto be used in the comments is not conducive to conversations we should be having)