Recently, I found out that a girl I knew from my childhood home was raped by her boyfriend. This was shocking to me seeing as we are fresh out of high school and entering college. We've just started adulthood and yet she will have to deal with this for the rest of her life. That's a lot to handle especially when you add the pressure of college to it... but was I really surprised to hear something as shocking as this?
I feel like this year alone I've seen more headlines of sexual assault and rape charges than any year before. Why is that? Maybe it's because now I'm at the age where sexual assault is most common. Maybe it's because now that it's my time to enter into college, I'm worried I will know more girls who are violated and don't get the help they need. Maybe because I'm afraid for myself...
I believe that America is behind the looking glass. We hear about these stories of rape and violence in college communities and while schools are working to fix this issue, it has clearly not been solved. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, between 20-25% of women will be a victim of either an attempted rape or a completed rape. This means that nearly one in every four girls will be sexually assaulted while attending college. Think about how many girls that is. I'm not good at math and yet even I know that is a large number.
If you break it down, eleven and a half million women attended college in 2015; which also means that two million eight hundred seventy-five thousand women were raped last year. Take a second to think about that. Almost three million girls... that is huge. That is larger than the populations of Jamaica, Lithuania and Botswana. The sooner our country realizes that this is not happening to "a few girls" and rather to millions, the better.
It is time for America to shatter the wall they are behind and take action. We can not let almost three million lives live in fear every year because of poor decisions. We need to begin promoting sexual awareness throughout campuses and from there take steps to prevent incidents of assault.
To the girls reading this... I'm sorry. I'm sorry that our country has not stepped up and helped protect us as we enter into college. I'm sorry to the girl at the University of Colorado whose rapist was set free with no prison sentence even after being convicted. I'm sorry to the girl who was raped by Brock Turner, whose name disgusts me. I'm sorry to all of the women whose voices haven't been heard and are stuck in these shadows. But until action is taken your stories will forever be behind the looking glass.
