Daryn Smith Assignment 16 Speech

One in five. One in five women who attend college experience rape at some point during their college career (Berenson). Take a minute to think about what this number amounts to. 162 million women attended college in 2014 (Infoplease). This means that 32,400,000 of them were raped. 99% of rape victims are women. Sexual assault is by no means uncommon, and is regarded with such hatred by our society. Yet it is rarely punished to a proper extent. Sexual predators often are able to escape without any consequences and continue to terrorize new victims. It is perhaps this commonality that causes us as a society to undermine the implications that sexual assault has on victims, their education, their whole life.

            Somehow, it has become easy for offenders to commit rape and not face the consequences they should. Specifically on college campuses, the number of expulsions for sexual assault is ridiculously low- only one in three cases result in expulsion (Kingkade). The problem goes back much further than one would think. The mitigation of sexual assault through rape culture, a lack of concrete evidence, unfavorable image for the school, and ruining of the offender’s life have caused sexual assault on college campus to go nearly unrecognized.

            Rape culture, or the blaming of victims of sexual assault and normalization of male sexual violence, plays a large part in undermining the actions of the offender. It comes in the form of sexualizing women, objectifying them, and blaming them for being assaulted, among other things. According to Southern Connecticut State University, “womanhood” is defined as submissive and sexually passive, while “manhood” is characterized as dominant and sexually aggressive. This gender role creates immense justification for sexually aggressive acts in the eyes of so many. People dismiss such actions by saying “boys will be boys” and speaking to the inevitability of rape. But rape only becomes inevitable when not enough is done to stop it. Rape is not inevitable. Rapists are living, breathing beings, with consciences and the capability to control themselves. Offenders aren’t animals. Their victims aren’t prey. We are all humans who must respect one another. If as many women were being kidnapped as are being raped, we would consider it a public crisis (Maxwell). Instead, we accept these occurrences as normal. We teach women how not to get raped rather than teaching men not to rape. We tell them not to wear inappropriate clothes, not to get too drunk, not to go out alone. Women should not be responsible for being attacked. Just as burglary victims are not held accountable for being robbed, sexual assault victims should not be held accountable for being assaulted. But far too often, we see this happen. We see victims whose lives have been changed be blamed for someone else’s crime.

            Such deep-rooted patterns are difficult to alter, but the Southern Connecticut State University came up with several ways. We must avoid degrading and objectifying language towards women. We must be supportive of rape victims and take their experiences seriously. We must be respectful of each other’s physical space. We must ensure that survivors know and do not feel that they are to blame. We must hold abusers accountable for their actions and prevent them from making excuses. We must not assume consent nor allow stereotypes to shape our actions. We will accomplish this through better education for women, improved mentorship and socialization of men, and improved survivor support services (Jarrett).

            A major barrier to bringing justice to sexual offenders comes with a lack of concrete evidence, as few cases lack witnesses. This leaves the trial to be decided by who presents a more believable argument, otherwise known as a “he said/she said” situation. Far too large a number of people are under the impression that women commonly lie about experiencing sexual assault. As a result, men who plead guilty are far too often not charged, convicted, and found responsible. While it is hard to find an exact number, various studies have shown that the vast majority of reported rapes are truthful. The most reliable accounts have found that only 2-8 percent of reports are false. This amounts to significantly fewer women lying about rape than those lying about most other crimes. Despite such evidence, people regard rape as one of the things victims lie about the most often. These people believe women are out to hurt men who they had consensual sex with. Among the low number of false reports is an even lower number that are due to the victim attempting to cause harm to the attacker. In reality, most false accusations come from women with significant emotional issues who seek attention and sympathy rather than harm for their alleged attacker (Marcotte). The small percentage of false accusations are, of course, the most highlighted and talked about. Consequently, people more readily believe the attacker’s innocent plea, and more readily dismiss the victim’s accusation. The amount of sexual offenders who are not found guilty is far too numerous.

            In order to move forward and combat this issue, we must as a society question and critique the gender bias underlying the policy of believing the attacker over the victim. Such bias is repeatedly shown through the low number of the accused who are found responsible or punished, and even through the low number of rape survivors who end up reporting it. Oftentimes women don’t bother because they feel it is hopelessly unlikely that anything will be accomplished in the process. Additionally, we must take steps to shatter the notion that women are inclined to lie about experiencing rape (only 2-8 percent are lying). It is not a willy-nilly term thrown around in courts and hearings. It is a legitimate attack and source of trauma for all those who have experienced it (Marcotte). To accomplish this, Valerie Jarrett on the White House blog page suggests empowerment of bystanders to speak out against sexually aggressive acts and more just response policies on our college campuses.

            In college hearings about sexual assault, schools are hesitant to punish offenders in fear of repercussions for their school. Former administrators on college campuses have discussed the policies of keeping reports quiet in an attempt to avoid hurting their reputation. Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, two young women who attended UNC at Chapel Hill both had experiences of administrators doing little to nothing about their reports. They found each other and worked together to bring Title IX into the issue, arguing that failure to expel rapists hinders their victims’ ability to further their education effectively. Now, 315 schools across America are under Title IX investigation. Such a large number of reports yield so few expulsions and minimal punishments if at all. Those who ended up being found responsible were sentenced to things such as community service and expulsion upon graduation, effectively ignoring the problem to keep it quiet. At Stanford University, from 1996 to 2013, 259 reported sexual assaults led to only one expulsion, meaning 258 victims had to continually live in the same vicinity as if not see their attacker regularly. If the outcome of a lawsuit is unfavorable to the school, they may file an appeal unfavorable for the victim (Know your IX). Such trauma upon seeing a person with which you have such bad memories is at the very least detrimental to your learning, happiness, and security.

            A recent case of sexual assault at Stanford gained massive media attention. Brock Turner was found assaulting a women who was entirely unconscious, tried, found guilty, sentenced to six months in jail, and released after only three months. The judge who gave the sentence was so lenient because time in prison would have “a severe impact” and “adverse collateral consequences” on Turner (Koren). Time and time again, we see sexual offenders -criminals, rapists- be pitied. There is no other crime in which we routinely sympathize with she/he who committed it rather than the victim. Offenders have been known to sue their victims for defamation of character, and multiple have requested that attackers names not be mentioned. As precedented by the legal system for countless years, names of criminals are released. Murderers, thieves, and fraudulent business owners’ acts are not ignored by the possibility that they succeed later in life. They are punished for doing something against the law. Why should it be any different in cases of sexual assault? We should and must have consequences for engaging in such repulsive acts. Why are assaulters constantly protected by their potential future when they’ve just robbed someone else’s? We must have consequences for engaging in criminal acts and the fact that our society has failed to implement these consequences for so long has left countless victims feeling worthless, hopeless, and degraded.

            The far-too-common instances of sexual offenders getting let off the hook raises several questions that we must ask ourselves as a society. Why do we continually treat people who harm others more favorably than we treat people who rob houses and banks? Why are victims routinely blamed for a crime they did not commit- a crime committed against them? What steps can we take as a society to treat both victims of rape and their attackers in a more just way? How do we address the gender biases in our society so that we treat this crime the same way we treat other crimes? How can we prevent these crimes from happening in the first place? Once we consider these questions, we must take action to solve them.  The mitigation of sexual assault through rape culture, a lack of concrete evidence, unfavorable image for the school, and ruining of the offender’s life have caused sexual assault on college campus to go nearly unrecognized. The first steps to solving this issue are beginning to emerge. We must seize the opportunity to implement them right away. We should teach children from a young age to respect one another, teach bystanders to speak out and intervene when they witness a risky situation, create harsher consequences for sexual assaulters, remove the belief that victims are at fault for experiencing attacks, prevent normalization of sexually aggressive acts, and work to avoid the notion that men ought to be dominant while women ought to be submissive. Over the recent centuries, our society has progressed immensely towards gender equality, and must continue to do so in the future. Nothing less than the well-being and security of victims is at stake.  

Bibliography

Baker, Christine. Confronting Campus Rape. 2014. The Patriot News, Carlisle, PA.

Berenson, Tessa. "1 in 5: Debating the Most Controversial Sexual Assault Statistic ." Time. Time, 27 June 2014. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

Harding, Kate. Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture -- and What We Can Do about It. 1st ed. Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2015. Print.

Infoplease. U.S. Census Bureau, n.d. Web.11 Dec. 2016.

The Hunting Ground. Dir. Kirby Dick. Perf. Annie Clark and Andrea Pino. 2015. DVD.

Jarrett, Valerie. "A Renewed Call to Action to End Rape and Sexual Assault." The White House. The United States Government, 22 Jan. 2014. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

Kingkade, Tyler. "Fewer Than One-Third Of Campus Sexual Assault Cases Result In Expulsion." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 19 Sept. 2014.           Web. 27 June 2016.

"Know Your IX." Know Your IX. KYIX, n.d. Web. 21 June 2016.

Marcotte, Amanda. "4 Dangerous Myths about Rape, Debunked." Salon. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

Maxwell, Zerlina. "Rape Culture Is Real." Time. Time, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

"RAPE CULTURE, VICTIM BLAMING, AND THE FACTS." Southern Connecticut State University. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.