Starting off college has been a fun and exhilarating experience. There are so many new faces and people that you don't know, so much opportunity to become whoever you want to be. With this, I have realized something that growing up in a small community I had never had to worry about before. Education about rape culture in college is getting better, but there still is a lot many people outside the classroom are not educated about.

Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you how all men are bad and will take advantage of you. There are good guys in this world, but the sad matter of it is, we are blinded by the overwhelming statistics that the "bad" ones are producing. The truth is that 1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault in higher education institutions (http://www.nsvrc.org/saam/campus-resource-list). This is a scary reality.

Growing up in small sheltered community, getting educated on the subject at first was daunting. I never suspected any of my classmates of anything like that because I grew up with them. Most of them I had known since kindergarten and would never think that any of them could be capable of this. I sat in the presentations thinking about how it could never really happen and unaware of the various subsections of sexual assault like stalking, etc... Then I went off to college and didn't experience it myself but I saw it up close. As women in society we are taught that these behaviors are exhibited from men when they like us and they are just "being boys". Girls are constantly put under blame for violence that happens against them. Particularly in the older generations we see the blame on the woman: What was she wearing? Was she drinking? Did she provoke him in any way?

These are daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. We need to make the change and stop making it acceptable for this to happen in our society.