One in four women will be sexually assaulted during their college career; of those incidents less than sixty-five percent will go reported. To put it simply, it is probable that a quarter of the women at UConn have been sexually assaulted and only half of them have filed claims. That is 5750 women. However, in 2010 there were only two cases reported to UConn law enforcement. Two. It doesn’t stop at our campus either. The Office of Justice Bureau Statistics has not released a publication or resource handling rape on their site since 2009. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there have been close to 200,000 more reported rapes since the year 2009 (and those are only reported cases).
Updated policies that protect college students’ rights to file claims and safety are extremely important to handle before an attack happens. Programs like SAFER (Students Active For Ending Rape) evaluate college rape policies and mark the loopholes and flaws that students need to advocate for to be changed. The UConn policy had a satisfactory critique with no major flaws…so why are women still being victimized?
The fight against Campus Rape has resorted to the backwards approach of helping victims instead of educating potential perpetrators. Sexual assault is treated as acceptable and expected. Advocating for strong disciplinary policies can make incredible differences in victim’s lives however, young women shouldn’t have to work so hard to protect themselves from the aftermath when they should be preventing attacks from ever occurring in the first place.
Women are burdened with the ideology of “Don’t get raped” when instead we should be teaching men “Don’t Rape”. The mainstream has even been kicked down enough to run preparatory articles for women, “I’ve Been Raped. Now What?” (Cosmopolitan 2012). The amount of media devoted to aiding victims of Campus rape trumps the few media outlets that are aimed towards teaching men to gain integrity and respect and to maybe, just maybe, stop Campus rape.
We’re better than this, UConn; our student body needs to learn to respect the bodies of the women who would like to feel safe in their own dormitories. We cannot only accept a decent sexual assault policy and offer resources for victims. We have got to sit down with the men in our lives and tell them, “This is not okay, it will never be okay.” Spreading awareness to friends may seem inconsequential but if every young woman expressed some sort of meaning to the men in her life it could prevent them from victimizing someone else. If one in four men had grasped the severity of the psychological and physical damage of sexual assault it could have saved a woman the trauma and degradation.
Start talking, with friends, brothers, anyone who will listen. Let them know that Campus rape is unacceptable. Tell them what they already think they know, and then tell them again- because apparently there is a 25% out there who don’t know the meaning of “stop.”