Before leaving for my freshman year of college, I was given a lot of advice. Don’t skip class. Make friends with your RA. Always remember the buddy system, especially late at night, especially because you’re a girl.
I was raised to accept certain actions as “the norm.” I talked on the phone with my mom or my best friend on after-dark walks from the library back to my dorm or across town, hanging up when I had secured my door tightly behind me. I didn’t put my drink down at a party or a bar. I walked to my car with a key sticking out of my clutched fist, prepared to increase the intensity of a punch. When a stranger commented appreciatively on the length of my skirt or swing of my walk I kept my head down and increased my pace, fearing retaliation would lead to escalation. I watched my sister accept and execute the same practices with a casualty bordering on basic instinct. I didn’t call it rape culture. I called it being a woman. I called it safety. I called it common sense. But there is nothing common about the strategies women are taught to avoid being assaulted.
In light of the sentencing of Stanford swimmer Brock Allen Turner’s sexual assault of a anonymous-in-name-only woman and its subsequent media coverage, I’ve had a lot of conversations with family members and friends about the way we talk about rape. Different individuals across the spectrum of age, gender and profession latch onto specific aspects of the case: race, university drinking culture, biological conditioning, the responsibility of the media, athlete privilege.
Maybe the Stanford rape case is receiving so much attention because it makes us reconsider who we think of as being capable of rape or what we think of when we picture a “rapist.” Maybe it has been the sometimes uncomfortable but necessary transparency of the women’s testimony. Maybe it’s the fact that we are finally confronting, in clear cut, 6-months-versus-14-years transparency, the flaws in a system that protects and prioritizes the aggressor instead of the victim. Whatever perfect-storm of controversy has brought this subject into the light, its about time. Conversations about how we teach young men and women to respect each other, how universities and the judicial system approach sentencing and how preventative action can become rooted in education and not fear-tactics should happen in classrooms, around dinner tables and in the public sphere, not just when a story breaks that captures America’s attention.
What I come back to each time, is the fact that a rape was committed. Without caveat, without background, without proviso. An unconscious individual was taken advantage of by another, surrendering their right of choice or consent by someone else who felt entitled to it. We can talk about the Stanford case through any number of lenses, but, regardless of gender, age, race or profession, what it comes down to is the unthinkable violation of basic human rights. Until we can candidly acknowledge the inefficiency in the way we think and talk about rape and rape culture, we are perpetuating a cycle that treats every individual as a future-victim, and not someone capable of preventing assault and empowering others.
