All The Rage Research Paper

All The Rage by Courtney Summers is a realistic fiction novel that is based on a rape survivor's life after trying to tell someone what happened to her. When Romy tried to tell someone no one believed her and she got bullied at her school for it, people would tell her that she lied about getting raped and say cruel things to her. The boy that raped her was named Kellan Turner and his father is the sheriff of Romy’s home town. So when she tried to go to the police he said, she was lying and her son would never do that, and from there on she gave up on trying to get help because no one believed her anyways. When one of her old best friends Penny the popular girl in school goes missing, she discovers that there is another girl in a town nearby that claims to have been assaulted by Kellan Turner too. She needs to decide whether she wants to speak out to help the girl, although no one believed her before. The research topic I chose to research in correspondence to the novel, is rape culture. The first thing i researched about sexual violence was the real life statistics to show how huge of
an issue that rape is today. I then analyzed why rape is such a big issue and how can we change our approaches to victims of sexual abuse. Lastly I learned about the actions we can take to prevent rape from happening. Rape is too prevalent in our culture, which is why we need to take stronger preventative measures to end this crime. Rape does not only happen to teenage girls at parties, unfortunately rape is a pretty common occurrence. It can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime that is why it is vital to inform people and to put an end to the crime altogether. 1 out of 10 victims in every rape case happen to be male. The most common age of victims of sexual assault are 18-34 years old. Although the crime of sexual assault takes a physical toll on the victim, the victims of sexual assault can also suffer from long term problems. “94% of women who are raped experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the two weeks following the rape” (rainn.org). Rape victims also contemplate suicide and some even attempt it. Survivors of this abuse may also act out at home or at school, they are more likely to try harder drugs and have an extremely hard time trusting others.
So everyone knows that rape is morally wrong all around, but if people know this why is it such a huge issue in our society today? Many people resort to blaming the victim for sexual abuse happening to them. Saying that maybe they shouldn't have worn such a revealing outfit, or they shouldn't have drank so much alcohol. For this reason rape is still a reoccuring problem today, because if you blame the victim for wearing a certain outfit or for drinking a little too much and NOT the abuser who thought that it would be okay to do such a dehumanizing action to someone.’ “This too close to you, Romy?” he pants. “Gonna cry rape?”’ (Summers pg 46). This quote is a typical example of how insensitive people can be dealing with such a cruel crime. This is why we need to inform and educate people to show them that rape is not a joking matter and when someone claims to have been sexually abused to ALWAYS get them help and not call them a liar or make them feel as if they don’t matter. Although there is no doubt that rape is a common occurrence in our society today, there are plenty of things we can do to prevent it from happening.
The first questions people usually ask about a rape crime are “What was the victim wearing?”, “Was the victim drunk?.” But these are the wrong questions that we ask, these questions make victims feel like them being sexually assaulted is there fault for wearing something revealing or drinking to much, but that does not mean they are asking to be violated it is NOT in any way their fault. We need to ask the questions of why the abuser thinks that something so immoral is okay to do to someone. “The right question is, ‘What made him think this is acceptable,”’ (The Nation). This is the approach we need to have on rape crimes, this does not put the blame on victims and it helps people to understand what they did was not okay for any
reason.
Rape culture in our society is too rampant today, and there are measures we can take to hinder it from happening. In the novel All The Rage I learned a lot about the life of a rape survivor and the impacts it had on her life. I chose to research more about this and learned that rape occurs way too much. In addition I also learned that victims of sexual abuse tend to have long term mental issue including PTSD and have trouble trusting people and may even start to act out. Additionally I learned that many people don’t take victims seriously and even have the audacity to make jokes about it to the victim's face. Additionally important I learned more about how we can prevent rape from happening by starting off asking the right questions, and not resulting to putting the blame on the victims saying they “were asking for it.”