Date Rape and a Culture of Fear
November 23, 2009 | Alicia Ostarello
Women and men can help prevent sexual assault
I’m not sure it’s possible to write an article about date rape that does not immediately lose the attention of most male readers and scare the bats from the bellies of female readers. I’m also not sure it’s possible to bring up the subject of rape with a small group of college women and not have one or more of them share (as they gaze down at their shoestrings and mumble) that they have been raped or sexually assaulted. But rape is happening on college campuses all over the country, and not on a small scale – and this is a problem.
It’s a really big problem at places like the University of Arizona. Recently, 10,000 issues of The Daily Wildcat, the free student newspaper were stolen from newstands by a couple of Phi Kappa Psi pledges; the reason? An article about a PKP party in which a female student believes she was given a date-rape drug.
I’ll clarify the terms “rape” and “date rape” since they are often used interchangeably. Much like a square is always a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always classified as a square, date rape is always rape, but rape is not always classified as date rape. Rape is when someone is forced to have sex without their consent, or with consent that was forced out of them via physical violence or unrelenting persistence (as in, she said “No,” for an hour before saying “Yes” because he wouldn’t stop bugging her). Date rape is a term for being raped by someone you know–in theory, this happens after you’ve been out on a date. Sometimes alcohol or date rape drugs are used to weaken the ability of a women to resist the rapist.
The statistics about sexual assault in college women are astounding–1 in 4 female students will be sexually assaulted while she is attending a university. Go ahead and look around your next class. One quarter of the women sitting at the desks around you have been or will be raped, coerced into performing sexual acts she does not want to be part of, touched in a way that feels violating, or be exposed to conduct of a sexual nature accompanied by actual or threatened physical force.
It’s kind of scary.
By kind of scary, I mean totally freaking terrifying.
And sadly, fear is part of the culture of rape.
See, the big issues at hand is that rape happens (to both men and women, but more often to women) on college campuses and that there are a lot of student perpetrators of rape who have either rationalized their actions, are uninformed or not in tune as to what rape is, or genuinely have no regard for other people’s boundaries and feelings.
But the smaller issues are that women are taught to be afraid of men, to be afraid to stick up for themselves, to be afraid of being alone on dark streets or be afraid at parties, and to be afraid of being thought less of if they are raped. And men are not being educated as to what rape is and why this is such a big issue, and are also being taught to be afraid of overstepping the murky boundaries that differ between each woman. Lots of fear.
Our culture is of no help either. Sexual assault is “by far the most under-reported violent crime,” according to Zach Nicolazzo, coordinator of Fraternity and Sorority Programs in the Center for Student Involvement and Leadership at the University of Arizona. “We constantly hear messages that say, ‘no means yes,’ ‘use alcohol to get her drunk first’ or ‘just look at what she was wearing–she was asking for it.’ The rape culture that we live in is incredibly pervasive, and works in insidious ways, sending messages about what it means to be a man and/or woman, which then impacts how we relate to each other and gain consent.”
There are a lot of issues surrounding rape, and a lot of fear. So what do we do about it? There are two sides: women should know the stats, protect themselves, and support an environment that does not allow rape to wallow in the shadows of dark campus secrets; in other words, talk about it with your friends–the girls and the guys. For men, they should know that this is happening, talk to their friends about it–the guys and the girls–and if you are ever not sure if a girl wants to have sex, then the answer is no.
Universities like the University of Arizona spend a lot of money of sexual assault awareness, hosting events like Take Back the Night, The Vagina Monologues, support student groups like Men Against Violence, and offer peer based and professional counseling services on the subject of rape. So it isn’t that the universities are ignoring this problem entirely–it’s that the problem persists. Which leads me to think we’re going about solving it the wrong way.
Maybe the answer to what we do about it isn’t just raise awareness. Maybe the answer isn’t just to empower women to speak out, though I think it would help. Maybe the answer happens before college and happens in how we educate people about sex, as well as how we portray sex in the media. That means, it would not be portrayed as the end-goal of any co-ed relationship and the best thing you could ever do ever with anyone no matter who they are. We should also clearly define social rules about rape from a young age so that there is no confusion, no darkness regarding what it is, and no fear in talking about it.
For more on this subject, check out this post on Fugitivus–I read it for the first time a few months ago, and I think it was the most powerful piece of writing I have read this year.
It is one of the embarrassments of being male that this happens so often with so little consequence. Who are these guys’ parents? What on earth let’s them rationalize this kind of behavior? And what a sad bad college memory for the girls who have to lock this away and get on with their lives?
I think part of the blame of a lack of consequence has to fall on the victim; while I all to well understand that speaking out is incredibly difficult, and often your voice lands on deaf ears, the only way to shed light on this issue is to talk about it.
The worst part, for me at least, is that the men involved in these situations don’t often seem to think they have done something wrong. When confronted, they really do use lines like “she totally wanted it,” and it’s so frustrating to not be able to get through to them. I think that’s how they rationalize it, and they refuse to hear anything else.
I think the issue needs to be addressed from a young age, explaining the difference between right and wrong, yes and no, and not being able to always get what you want when you want it.
Of course, there are plenty of males who feel the way you do, and I know they hate being placed in the category of potential perpetrator, and I hate that most women feel they need to place every male there.