I recently went to a seminar held at my college about sexual assault and domestic violence. It was a last minute choice after being invited by a friend. I showed up with no expectations, in fact, I almost left seconds before it started to go eat Mexican food, but I’m glad I stayed. I learned something really important that night in the seminar. I learned that this fight to end sexual assault was far more simplistic than I thought yet that does not mean it is ending anytime soon.

To end this awful problem all it takes is someone saying "no" and another person saying "I respect you." All it takes is for the guy who sees the drunk girl to take her to get water without once touching her. All it takes is for out society to stop normalizing the words “slut,” “bitch,” “whore.” It’s teaching our kindergarten girls that the boy poking at her may “like” her but that is not the way to treat a girl. It is seeing the girl at the party who’s a little too tipsy and helping her home, but that’s not going to happen. That would mean going against the grain. That would mean potentially causing a scene (and how dare you do that, right?), but that is what we need to do. The more scenes we cause, the less sexual assault happens.

As someone who is planning on teaching early childhood education, I was extremely baffled when the guy speaking said that by kindergarten age, violence in relationships is normalized. My first thought was that fact is false; it’s not true for every kid. I grew up in a home without abuse and violence, so I can fight that fact, but he continued. He claimed this was true because in kindergarten you are told a boy “likes” you because he pinches you, he teases you and he chases you around the playground. Then, when you go to tell a teacher what is happening, they tell you to ignore it because that mean he “likes” you.

That was the most real thing I have ever heard. Let me tell you, in an adult relationship, if you pinch the girl you “like” that is not going to end well; the last thing they will do is reciprocate those feelings. As someone who has a future in teaching that exact age, we normalize violent relationships and I learned that my job just got bigger. I now have to teach my boys how to treat girls and teach my girls the importance of being respected. If you had told me this a year ago, I would have laughed in your face because who knew that this is what our world has come to. The difference this could make though is astounding. Imagine every elementary school teacher punishing this behavior and making it a classroom rule. Imagine. But, in reality, that is not going to happen because everyone loves to witness a good ole’ elementary school crush.

But then, those same girls getting pinched in kindergarten are now being called whores in middle school. No matter what they wear or how they act the boys feel the need to call them names in order to prove their dominance and masculinity to other boys. They do so without thinking twice of the after effect it was on the person. They once heard the cool eighth grader say it and they think it’s normal, but it is not. That girl now has the most negative image of her body.

She knows being a "whore" is bad, and with every message the world is sending her about her body, she begins to feel insecure and she begins to maybe actually think she is one. This only encourages the boys more. By the time she is in high school, she is learning about how confident a boy can get with his hands. She knows it’s wrong what he is doing but no matter how many times she moves her hand or says no he just laughs it off then tries again later. She is scared and wishing that boys still just chased her around the playground. She wants to tell someone but is afraid of getting in trouble herself so she deals with it alone. By this time in her life, she is confused and hurt. She is done with boys and is beginning to think that there is not a single good one left.

Then these girls go to college. There is excitement for change and freedom. There are parties, alcohol, dancing and everything else you could ever imagine that these girls had heard about from television, magazines, other older girls that they looked up to, etc… The girl meets a boy, he’s nice and treats her better than the other boys she’s encountered. He takes her on dates and buys her flowers. She believes there are good guys in the world again. She begins to think that the names she was called in middle school and the hands all over her in high school are things of the past. One night she goes to a party; she drinks a lot and loses her friends.

Thankfully a guy sees her almost fall and catches her. She hugs him a little too hard and overly thanks him due to the alcohol. He takes that as a way to start dancing with her. She soon starts to doze off and he brings her to a dark room. She trusts that he is bringing her to a place to sleep. That’s the last thing she remembers. The next morning she wakes up naked and alone. Through her massive hangover, she puts the pieces together.

While that seems overdramatic, it’s sadly not. Something so awful could have been so easily prevented. From awareness to how we teach our kids to treat each other is now we prevent such awful things from happening. This is not just a teacher’s job, though. It’s also not just the auditorium of women I was sitting with; it’s every guy’s job, it’s every parent's and every witness's job. It’s scary to fight for what’s right sometimes but, we need to think about the future. As someone who one day wants to be a mom, I know that I would do everything in my power to make sure that my child never went through that.

If I have yet to convince you that sexual assault is a problem and that we need to work together to stop it, please go watch "Dear Daddy." I watched it and it made me even more convinced that it is possible to stop this problem but, not without a lot of dedication from a lot of people.