A few months ago I was home for spring break and an article came up on my Facebook that landed me crying at the kitchen table. It was the story of two college girls who tried to take a third girl they met at a party back to their dorm to protect her. When they get back to their dorm the girl doesn't have her ID and their college won't let her stay with them. It proceeds to tell how the college treated the three of them as criminals and sent the third girl to the police. In this story no one was raped. But they so easily could have been. If that third girl had stayed at the frat house drunk there is no saying what could have happened. Sitting outside the campus police office, the author talks of how powerless she felt. So many women can relate to this feeling of powerlessness.
Since reading this article a video on Facebook caught my attention. The video is narrated by a daughter telling her father how she will be treated as she grows up. It touches on how she will get drunk and boys will try to take advantage of her, how she will be called names, and how the way men talk about women and girls translates to actions. It's horrifying but not shocking. It details the things that so many teenage girls will face through their lifetime.
Another video produced by the White House and College Humor, used a bear to explain how common and ignored rape is. The fact is that one in five women will be sexual assaulted. It is so unbelievably easy to assume that it won't affect you. As the video says one in five people not necessarily one in the five of us. This is the mindset of so many people.
Recently one particular rape case has been in the news a lot. Brock Turner, a Stanford undergraduate, was convicted on three felony sexual assault charges. He was then sentenced to six months in county jail. As more and more details of the situation, the crime, the case, and the people are released it is painting a horrifying image of entitlement, rape, and the world we live in. The case seems very straight forward. Turner raped an unconscious girl behind a dumpster. And yet he doesn't seem to believe he did anything wrong and neither does his father comparing it to "20 minutes of action." This is the world we live in. A world that treats girls as objects with the purpose of being available whatever for men. We teach boys that they can take the things that they want without permission, that no doesn't mean no, and that they don't need to be held responsible for their actions.
The Stanford case is just the latest example in the way that we are failing. People have been trying to tell us for years and generations and we have been ignoring them. Instead of talking about rape and trying to change the culture we have created, we have blamed victims, pushed it away, and done our best to ignore it. It is truly horrifying that we live in a world that can't seem to recognize the unjustice in the culture we have created.
