R. A. P. E. Rape. It’s a grisly word by anyone’s standards. No rapist is proud to be a rapist. In fact, most rapists don’t even know they’re rapists. This is because we have refused to talk about it. We have refused to acknowledge it. We have refused to accept responsibility for it. That is until very recently.
Sexual assault has been in the spotlight of the media for the past couple years among college campuses. It has always been one of those taboo topics that are not much talked about. Most college campuses around America have stricter punishments for cheating on a test than for committing sexual assault.
In 2014, The Huffington Post requested 50 colleges across the nation to speak about their sexual assault punishment policies. More than a dozen of these schools refused to supply that information. Among those are some big-name universities such as Notre Dame, American University, and even Princeton.
But why is that? Up until a few years ago, the topic of sexual assault was simply dismissed with a “boys will be boys” stigma. But in the last couple years, this topic must be addressed more than ever.
To look at this topic, we have to look at what defines sexual assault. Sexual assault is defined by the federal government as any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. According to the government, that means that sexual assault can be as simple as a misplaced hand or a loose word. The legal definition itself is very straightforward. So what makes the problem so complicated on college campuses?
To start with, the sexual assault statistics on college campuses are very troubling when actually looked at. According to the National Sexual Violence Research Center, one in every five women and one in every sixteen men are sexually assaulted while attending college. Now to put that into perspective, the average college class has 25 to 35 students in it. That means approximately five to seven women and two to three men sitting in your average college classroom will be sexually assaulted during their time in college.
Time to complicate the scenario a bit more. According to the NSVRC, nine out of 10 rape victims know their assaulter in some way. When people hear the word rape, they generally form an idea of knifes, dark alleys, and stalking. Today, if you ask a college student what they think of when they hear rape, they will most likely reply with stories of parties, bars, and even dates that went horribly wrong. Some will even have memories of it themselves. And some will have no memories of it.
That’s where the gap is. The perception of rape within the mind of the average American and the mind of the college student is completely different. The main reason may also be the easiest way to justify these actions in the mind of a rapist and even the minds of society.
Alcohol. It is easy to say that the victim should have been more careful with how much she drank or she should have watched where she put her drink. But the actual statistics would argue such a benighted statement.
According to a study done in 2007 by the National Institute of Justice, 88 percent of women claim to have never consumed a drink left unattended, and 76 percent of women claim to have never consumed a drink given to them by a stranger.
In the same study, only 23 percent of the sample reported drinking or taking drugs before engaging in sex. Despite these numbers, it still happens and usually by an acquaintance. Now most college students are not idiots and they know, or at least they claim to know, that if one party is too drunk to give clear consent then it means there is no consent there. Ninety percent of all campus rapes are perpetrated by three percent of the male population, and two/thirds of those will be repeat offenders.
But with the introduction of alcohol into sexual situations, it brings up an interesting and unfortunately common misconception. If both parties are too inebriated to think clearly, then the sex simply becomes a next morning mistake, right? Perhaps in some situations this would be true, but this scenario commonly portrayed in our society by movies, television shows, musical culture, and even the culture of previous generations, has bred a very easily justifiable way to sexually assault someone.
The perception of sexual assault on a college campus in just the past few years has changed drastically and mostly for the better. Ten years ago, if a someone was sexually assaulted on a college campus, it was likely dismissed as simple carelessness of the victim allowing the perpetrator to easily create an ethical justification in their head. With the (slow but steady) death of this “victim’s guilt” belief, it has made it more difficult to justify such actions. So a new plan had to be created.
The plan started as a clearly immoral two-step plan: get them drunk. sleep with them. Now it has become a very morally muddy stratagem. The new plan: get them drunk, get drunk myself, sleep with them, has created a whole new level of ethical justification for the rapist for if the perpetrator is drunk to at the time that the assault happens than they can simply fall back on the old "drunken mistake" excuse.
This does not need to be complicated. This is not okay. If the end goal is to sleep with someone that has not given consent through a copious consumption of alcohol, then it’s not okay. The real difficulty in preventing this is noticing it. It is easy to see a completely sober party guest trying to get another drunk, but if this person appears to be drinking just as much (whether they are or not at the time is a different question), it can be hard to spot as an outsider. The best way to prevent this is to have friends with you that can and will look out for you.
For centuries, the push of more ethical methods by society in just about any area has led to an equal push to find social justification for the same areas by insidious parties. These methods of social justification are often difficult to condemn at first but the first step to condemning them is recognizing it as immoral.
