...) Rape Culture on College Campuses and Why it Prevails Rape has become a taboo topic. Sexual assault is sugar coated into something less disturbing and brutal than it actually is. But rape is rape: the act of male or female taking sexual control or dominance over a nonwilling participant. It does not matter whether or not people feels comfortable discussing the topic of rape. Uncomfortability does not make a problem disappear. It is possible that rape culture is ignored because no one knows a permanent solution for it. But not talking about it will not fix it. An environment where rape culture prevails is on college campuses. 1 in every 4 college students admit to being raped or sexually assaulted on campus, this number fails to include the thousands of rape victims whose stories are never heard. Rape culture prevails on college campus because only an estimated 35% of these victims’ abusers are dealt with. Of those, only an estimated 20 30% percent are dealt with severely. Colleges ignore the severity rape culture on campus because it is a problem that is extremely difficult to remedy, but ignoring a problem will not solve it. “Culture is vital to the human species, but some cultural patterns are destructive” (Herman 45). Rape culture occurs when a set of values or beliefs create an environment that is conducive to rape. Rape culture does not refer to an actual place or setting, but to a culture that directly and indirectly surrounds and supports rape. ...
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...murder, is rape (Byers 47). As defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary rape is unlawful sexual intercourse carried out by force. Despite rape being an abominable crime more than half of all victims do not report their rape to authority (Byers 47). Of those victims who do report ninety percent are women (“Scope of”). Among those women, one in five are victims of sexual assault in college (Kutner 31). However, colleges are not doing enough to protect their female student body. The Center for Public Integrity has reported that only ten to twenty-five percent of these campus rapist will be expelled from school in fear that the school's reputation would be tarnish...
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...that victim are four times greater for a college female student than for any other age group. The phenomenon of date rape is not new, however it has evolved into a communication phenomenon, in which communication about sex and rape, the negotiation of consent, the rape itself, the aftermath of rape and the reaction to date rape, are central to defining a rape culture on campus. Women have been muted in a multitude of ways, including the methods in which women tell stories, through male-controlled media, in ways women’s bodies are portrayed and analyzed, and through censorship of women’s voices. Rape is a horrible experience, so why would women keep quiet about it. Campus cultures perpetuate the `culture of silence` that exists among young men and women by fostering a culture of rape which silences experiences and advocates victim blaming (self blame) that is set ablaze by the social acceptance of rape myths, experiences not being defined as rape, secondary rape, and the absence of deterrence, all of which create an underlying tolerance towards rape. In this paper I will examine how women are affected by the rape supportive culture that exists on campuses and creates an internalization of self blame are muted before, during, and after the experience of date rape. Both male and female students contribute to muting women, thus perpetuating a rape culture in which rape becomes an expectation, or part of the social milieu. Only a male dominated society that trains men to use women as...
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...A prominent example of this issue was presented by the fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, of Georgia Tech University. They were found singing lyrics to songs that described explicit ways to rape the women who were at their parties. Not only did these songs contribute to finding humor in a dehumanizing act towards women, but also to the normalization of rape. The actions of the fraternity went unchecked and the members did not face any consequences, which led to the sexual assault of at least two women (Chemaly Paragraph 2). Eventually, when emails sent between fraternity members instructed the men on how to sexually assault females at their parties, these songs were used to support the case against them. However, the Phi Kappa Tau’s lawyer claimed in their defense that the rape victims were “‘exploiting the hypersensitivity of today’s college campus environment toward sexual assault”’ (Chemaly Paragraph 2). While some people in modern society tend to overhype current issues in the world, sexual assault is a recurring and prevalent concern among college women who have triple the chance of getting raped than their male peers (Angelone 188). Desensitization of such songs leads to a greater proclivity for the incidence of rape or sexual assault. Furthermore, at an off-campus fraternity at Amherst College in Massachusetts, students were found with t-shirts depicting a woman clad in her bra and panties who was bruised and tied to a stick with a an apple in her mouth while being...
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...female student victims, only 1 in 5 report it (RAINN). Campus sexual assault is, thanks to the media, something we have all become painfully and unfortunately more familiar with than we would like to be. We hear the more publicized cases, where girls are unwillingly stripped of their clothes and left crying in fetal position in the top floor bedroom of a frat house The perpetrator was a straight-A student, a seemingly nice, upper-class boy who got a scholarship to the university, who was planning on pledging a fraternity, who could never do something like this. The narrative...
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...should imagine that you are writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper that this article was published in. 1. Identify two rape myths that were discussed in class or in your readings. Highlight or underline the rape myths in the text. Use coloured highlighters or pens to differentiate the two myths. Please explain the false assumptions that the author is making. /5 Prior to discussing the rape myths that are used in this column, rape myths must first be explored in terms of how they entail. Rape myths are prejudicial and stereotyped beliefs about rape and synonymous situations surrounding sexual violence [1]. These beliefs are used as a tool to minimize the seriousness of sexual violence. They belittle the act and, in the process, influence self-blame of the victims. This, in turn, decreased the probability of these crimes being reported due to the increased level of victim blaming....
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...timely warning has been issued at University Park in regards to a rape or forceful sex offense on campus. We slide open our phones, check to see the details of the warning, and then close our screens to continue on with our day. However, although we may seem unaffected by the warning, someone’s life has become completely altered and turned upside down. In his powerful and tear-jerking narrative, Missoula, Jon Krakauer becomes the voice behind those involved in these tragic and nauseating cases that we are quick to bypass as just timely warnings. As a journalist, Krakauer’s main mission is to give a voice to the voiceless and shed light on the injustices...
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...Gender specific violence is a term used to capture violence that occurs as a result of the traditional role beliefs related to each gender, along with the imbalanced power relationships between the two genders, within the circumstance of a particular society. In America, there are certain crimes that are gender specific. For example, rape is a gender specific crime that is targeted primarily on women. Women are defined based on their relationship to men and their space in male hegemonic structures (Guy-Sheftall). Hegemonic masculinity is the perfectly created male and is class and race bound. Hegemonic masculinity is against femininity. Characteristic of hegemonic masculine...
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...a smaller minority population, demographers have shown between 1 in 3 Indigenous female youths aged 25 and under have encountered sexual violence. This number also means Native American Girls are 2.5 times more likely to suffer sexual violence than any other ethnic group. 34.1% of sexual assaults upon Indigenous female youths reportedly occurred on campus. According to National Institute of Justice Native male youths 27.5 % have encountered rape. That which occurred on campus is currently unaccounted for. As reported by Human Rights Campaign 65% of Indigenous transgender have also suffered at the hands of sexual violence, such as the case in the documentation of the sexual assaults on Indigenous boys there is no said data. The reasoning...
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...In Rape Culture Is... the video discuss the difference between consent and and coercion. Lynn Philips describe rape culture as people making fun of women who have been abused, the video further discusses how woman are usually taken advantage of, and how the word rape is often thrown around. In our society, when someone comes out saying they have been raped, there are always those questions asked, like what were you wearing, how were you acting, and even more. Those questions make a person feel like it was there fault but in reality it wasn't, no one is asked to be raped. In Campus Rape Victim: A Struggle for Justice, they discuss how rape victims first intent is to be quiet when they are first assaulted. They often blamed themselves and don't come forward when it happens. The text went into detail of the stories of those who were a victim of rape. They talked about the Jeanne Clery Act, that would make campus a safer place to be. In Valin and Auleb's Sexual Violence and Abuse, the slides covered facts and statistics about rape. One of the slides mentioned that silence means no, I feel like in most cases, the abusers think that it was ok because the person didn't say anything, when in reality it's not okay. In the Band Back Together, the text covers some myths regarding male sexual assault. The whole text talks about how males can be a victim of sexual assault, but society always sees men as people who can defend themselves, even though that is not true. And in...
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...Alcohol is a big influence on sexual assault. A lot of blurred lines are created because a person drunk is a whole lot different than when they are sober. They may not have been able to consent because of how drunk they were. The hook up culture on a college campus can also make it blurred between what is sexual assault and what is not. In one study done, about nineteen percent of female first year students reported being sexually assaulted when they had been drinking (Mouilso). It causes what really happened in that moment hard to determine because of alcohol being involved. It is so often times you hear girls saying that they are not going to report it because they had been drinking alcohol and fear that they are going to get in trouble for drinking underage. With a big hook up culture on campuses, it creates another blurred line when you are drunk. You hook up with someone while you are drunk and in the morning you know that you would not have hooked up with the person if you were sober. That thought so often causes this blurred line because it makes you unsure if it is rape or...
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...From a sociological viewpoint, we comprehend the word “culture,” to be things that people frequently engage in simultaneously as a society. So when we talk about “rape culture”, we’re talking about cultural systems that we frequently participate in together as a society that excuses or tolerates sexual violence. This is widely seen on college campuses across the United States of America. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law that proscribes discrimination on the substratum of sex, which can includes sexual harassment, rape, and sexual assault in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding (ACLU, 2015). However this public policy is inconsistent in some ways. In order to make it more...
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...As you read this sentence, someone is being raped on an American college campus. Imagine for a moment if you weren’t reading this sentence, and instead being a victim of rape? The question makes anyone’s body shiver, yet it doesn’t cross our mind when our parents drop us to college that we are entering a world as wild as one can imagine. Our excitement and hope at this new stage in life is unexplainable, but while we are glooming with happiness our parents are entering an alarming state of unease, because we are not immune to the hidden danger of rape, and other sexual crimes that happen in our new found “comfort zone.” Every new day is an example of a college potentially mishandling the sexual assault of one of its students. While sex crimes are on the rise in America’s higher-education system, so does the institutions negligence. The purpose of this paper is to try and unravel the injustices and misconceptions of what...
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...Sec A #1 – -One out of five female students on college campuses will experience sexual assault. If there was a university-wide reading of “S. A Novel About the Balkans” by Slakenka Drakulic, it would change campus culture for the better. The women affected by war essentially have no name, no life, and are nothing, but humiliated by male soldiers. This is the case in sexual assault on campus. In Reading S, it would allow for women to feel more comfortable about talking of rape, and bring light to the spectrum, instead of rape being the extreme. It would bring awareness to students on how going through war takes away a persons name, and life. On investingwest.org, many women at a campus explain their experiences after being sexually assaulted. “Both women say the schools’ handling of their cases compounded their trauma, and both point to insensitive handling that ranged from inappropriate questioning to being required to go through mediation sitting near the man they had accused” This is in issue among many campuses, and a sexual assault seminar should be apart of every school orientation, women should feel comfortable to talk about rape. Each character in the novel only has their first initial as their name besides two characters, Maj and Brit who were not apart of the war. “Were not human anymore, thinks S. the camp has stopped us from feeling human. How will we ever get used to living outside the camp again?” (Drakulic 130) from this quote alone we are able to understand...
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...The effects of alcohol on date rape on college campuses Jessica Lynch Tarleton State University Abstract College is usually thought of as a time for pushing boundaries, experimenting, coming into ones own, learning, making new friends, learning to be independent, and becoming an adult. Unfortunately date rape has also become a part of the college experience. It is a life shattering reality of many college students. Date rape does not conform to the normal idea of rape. The perpetrator is usually an acquaintance and the rape takes place in a semi-public place, like a party or dorm room. Alcohol is almost always involved in date rape. Rape is never the victim’s fault but there are steps that can be taken to help prevent it. The effects of alcohol on date rape on college campuses College is supposed to be a time of learning, fun, making new friends, discovering one’s self, partying, and dating. Unfortunately, college becomes a nightmare for some women when partying and dating are combined. Date rape has become very common amongst university students. It is important to understand what date rape is, how alcohol affects the rapist and the victim in date rape, and how it can be prevented. What is date rape? Rape is usually thought of as something that happens to other people, done by a stranger in a dark alley or during a home invasion; however, that is not usually the case. In fact, forty-seven percent of rapists are a friend or acquaintance of the victim. According to the Federal...
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