20% of College Men Sexually Assault College Women
April 5, 2011
by Amy Siskind
|The following op-ed is featured at The Huffington Post.
Yesterday, Vice President Biden and Secretary Duncan announced a Sexual Assault Awareness Campaign. The impetus? The Department of Education acknowledges a grave threat to this generation: 20 percent of college women will be victims of rape or sexual assault!
We live in a civilized country, after all. Who is assaulting these young women? The answer, of course, is our college men! Ponder this: roughly 20% of our college men will rape or sexually assault a college woman before they graduate.
Let me put this another way. This weekend, when you go to your son’s little league or lacrosse game, watch his team take the field. Two of the boys on his team will grow up to rape or sexually assault a college classmate. How did we let it get to this?
When I read the Department of Education stats, I felt a knot in my stomach. My daughter will enter college and have a 20 percent chance of being a victim? What are mothers and fathers to do to protect our daughters? We can’t send chaperones on campus. Or lock our daughters up in their dorm room. But, we certainly can use this information as a teachable moment to arm our daughters with information.
But if that’s all we do as parents, it’s a cop-out! We have failed this generation. We as parents must arm our sons with information too! Bluntly stated: we need to explain sexual boundaries to this generation of boys and young men.
A story yesterday at The Daily Beast about the Title IX Complaint Against Yale crystallized, for me, just how misinformed this generation of young men has become. One of the Yale women involved in filing the complaint describes a freshman orientation sex ed seminar:
The subject was date rape; the teaching model two actors on a stage, play-acting a sex scene. “Everyone in the audience was given paper STOP signs, and we were supposed to raise them when we thought a crime was being committed… I put mine up first. But most of the rest didn’t go up until after the crime had been committed.”
Parents, if you are gasping, you should be!
We need to recognize that life is different today. Our children are bombarded with messaging in our popular culture which not only sexualizes young girls, but also puts girls in the role of victims. Our young children are fed a steady diet of this in music, video games, movies and of course, all over television. From 2004 to 2009, there was a 400 percent increase in the depiction of teen girls as victims of violence. If you want a sampling of what your children see, watch this.
Armed with this information, what’s next? Take action! It’s time for a conversation with our sons.
It is incumbent for us as parents to explain boundaries to our sons. To use teachable moments to open a dialogue with our sons about what is permissible, and what is not. The old, quaint adage: “No, means no!” Explained in detail of what that actually means.
Even if you as a parent cannot do it for the ‘right’ reason — that rape and sexual assault are unforgivable, uncivilized and completely, unequivocally wrong — then buy off on this: if you do not educate your son, he could ruin his life.
A young man convicted of rape or sexual assault will find his life forever altered. Of course, he will have his own internal nightmares, but that’s just the start. His ability to find a job will diminish. His career trajectory will be deflated. His social circle will look at him differently, or exclude him altogether. His prospects of romance will erode.
And know this: courtesy of the New Administration Effort announced yesterday, Vice President Biden and Secretary Duncan have:
…introduced comprehensive guidance to help schools, colleges and universities better understand their obligations under federal civil rights laws to prevent and respond to the problem of campus sexual assault.
You read that right: “obligations.” Sound threatening? Yes. And, not a moment too soon!
“Bluntly stated: we need to explain sexual boundaries to this generation of boys and young men.”
Yes, yes we do! However, we’re up against the huge power of the rape culture we live in. History and society is working against us. In the olden days, in a more right wing style, we taught boys not to hit girls, we stressed that girls were to save themselves for marriage, that it was wrong to violate a woman. Yes, this attitude had all sorts of problems and was as sexist as could be, but the extreme left leaning flip flop we have made has been extremely damaging too. The sexual revolution has left us with this idea that women are now sexual commodities, and that message is reinforced by the media, by pornography. To make matters worse, we have promoted this false idea that women have now attained equality, which translates into meaning, there’s no need to respect women anymore. I’m not advocating a return to the 1950′s, I’m just suggesting that we examine our cultural changes and start realizing that there should be some middle ground for our culture to exist in rather than one extreme or another.
We can explain sexual boundaries to our son’s until we are blue in the face, but if what they see all around them contradicts what we are trying to teach, then we’re not going to be able to get through.
Actually we need to tell Corporate Media we have had enough. And since the men who run it don’t process language we need to do that by impacting the profits of Corporate Media in a very negative manner. I would suggest demanding control over which channels enter our homes and end the forced extortion of payments for sexist channels no one even wants. Demand Congress take action and give us cable choice. Do not take a load of obscure babble as an answer. Of course to do this liberal women will need to cooperate with conservative women.
Exactly right yttik, women have been given the idea that they need to “service” men and men have been given the idea that women are commodities. Women have been stripped of their humanity. I do not understand why some believe that women do not deserve to have the right to determine who they will have sex with; rape is really not a sex crime but a violation of basic human rights. I wonder if rape was recast as a civil rights issue if rapists would actually do more time–more than than they do now if they are convicted.
I went to a college with a young woman who supposedly “pulled a train” Remebering her face, swollen and crumpled up, I wonder how her life was altered.
By the way here is the next plan of Corporate Media to control what we see by controlling the internet. If they win “women’s content” will be one big vapid batch of women prancing around in porn inspired lingerie interrupted every 5 minutes with lip gloss commercials. Just like the magazines and “women’s content channels” Corporate Media controls now. Women need to beat back Corporate Media.
http://www.womensenews.org/sto.....mens-media
I agree, here in the UK barely 2 weeks go by without seeing a story about a false rape allegation (this one’s particularly shocking http://nosleeptilbrooklands.bl.....-rape.html). The white middle-aged male dominated media is creating a culture in which women are to blame for everything and nothing needs to change. I don’t understand why they would do such a thing but they clearly are, and as a result we have a society where rape and sexual assault are treated as trivial matters.
I do have one fairly big problem with your article though. The statistic that 20% of female college students experience sexual assault does NOT mean that 20% of college men carry out a sexual assault. You’d need to do more research to be able to claim that.
Mike it is great that you are speaking up. I agree that 205 victim does not necessarily mean 20% offenders. you might very well have repeat offenders, but you might also have non reported assaults on the other hand. hard to get clean numbers. I happened to stumble across an article i I believe in the guardian last summer when the story of the rapes in the Bolivian Mennonite community broke. There was a story about a poll done by interview asking young males of a certain age bracket whether they ever raped a woman and about 30% admitted to it. I believe it was a study from Italy and it is too bad that I did not take notes. and was just outraged. but with this info 20% in a college might not be off too much. what we need is that the 70-80 % who do not approve speak up like yourself. we would get a world with a lot more freedoms and options for women and girls. I’ve come to recognize more and more the restraints women take on themselves and are encouraged to to avoid getting in danger of being raped.
Mike,
The occurrences of “repeat offenders” is offset by rampant “gang rapes”. You’ll need to cite some empirical evidence indicating there is anything more than a slight variance from 20%.
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