Rape Culture

On average one in five women will be a victim of some kind of sexual assault sometime in their lives, which is an astronomical number of women. Rape culture goes hand in hand with party culture. Colleges are the breeding grounds of party culture, we’ve all heard of the crazy parties that happen at colleges, and as of late the world has seen an influx of rapes on college campuses. What is Rape Culture? Rape Culture is the normalization of sexual assault and the culture surrounding it. We can fix rape culture on college campuses by teaching young teenage boys about the importance of consent and that a girl under the influence of alcohol isn’t a free pass for an uninvited sexual encounter; we can also help by teaching boys from a young age that
Consent is a conscious lucid verbal decision to engage in sexual behavior. Some states such as California are putting forth legislation to make more known the rape culture seen on college campus recently. Kristen N. Jozkowski states in that students heavily rely on consent cues which in turn breaks the affirmation consent policies which are in place on most college campuses (Jozkowski). The climate around campuses must change; not just with the student, but the students are a great starting point. Consent classes should be given to all students and student should know exactly what consent is, respecting others consent and NO MEANS NO. Consent is the most important part of being sexually active, therefore campus administrators should be doing more to make sure those boundaries stay unbroken. In a sexual assault case from 2013,where the assaulter was given minimum punishment at The University Of Kansas, a spokesperson for the university refused to call the incident sexual assault or a rape, prompting to call it non-consentual sex (Jozkowski). The definition of rape according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “ sexual intercourse with a woman by a man without her consent and chiefly by force and deception .” All that the spokesperson was saying by not calling an assault an assault was that consent is useless which lies at the heart of
So was the judge who sentenced him to only six months in jail. Brock Turner was a star collegiate swimmer who only served three of those six months, a minimum sentence, for raping a girl behind a dumpster at a party. Now Activists, colleges and legislators are working together to help fix this crisis. A survey on MIT of eleven thousand students recently showed that twenty-four percent of females and seven percent of male students have experienced unwanted sexual behavior directed towards them (Cooper). However, under five percent had actually reported anything. MIT took up their own initiative and held meetings, hired more staff for the sexual assault prevention programs and advanced their reporting process. In 2015 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a billed aimed at requiring an affirmative consent standard, a student bill of rights and immunity from getting in trouble for minor offenses if they report a sexual assault; this bill went in to full effect at all the states colleges and universities in July 2016 (Cooper). It’s still not enough, but it is definitely a start to help fix this problem. Some other schools have taken different approaches to combating sexual assault on campuses. A fraternity in Pennsylvania recently went co-ed because it lost its charter, everything after was different. Parties were no longer about sexual encounters, and the members didn’t treat it as such; they appointed designated watchers to make