It's not just women anymore

Did you know that in a group of 100 rapists, only three will spend time in jail? Because I sure didn’t.

I had to research rape and abuse statistics for an essay recently. I considered myself well-versed in women’s rights, but what I found shocked me.

First of all, the fact that people still try and pin the blame for rape on women because of the clothes they wear or because they go out — and hey, if the girl didn’t want sex then why is she such a slut — is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Second, the more I learned about rape and abuse, the more I thought the fact they are still categorized as only women’s rights issues cuts out a huge chunk of the problem.

While women’s rights was the driving force behind the movement and legislation to protect sexual assault victims, this issue has broken out of being just about feminism.
 
It has become larger, and scarier.

It isn’t just women who are the victims of sexual attacks and domestic abuse anymore. Children of both sexes are considered one of the biggest groups of victims, followed closely by homosexual males and immigrants.

When I went to look at the process for the prosecution of a rapist, I found there wasn’t really one.

There are many forms of abuse, of which only a small percentage are prosecutable. Many women don’t recognize when they are being abused, because they don’t have available resources, support and/or confidence in the system that should exist to help them.

As I researched, I remembered sitting in a health class in high school, learning that in a recent survey, 35 percent of the participants said they would rape if they had the chance and if they thought they could get away with it.

35 percent. And if all the men that make up that 35 percent commit a rape, only 3 percent of them will have to worry about being punished for their crime.

That is shocking to me.

And that’s just rape in which the victim is a physically adult female. Every 2 minutes, someone is sexually abused or attacked.

What I found even scarier was when I met with my professor to discuss my outline for my essay, and later when we peer-edited in class, both my professor and my classmate said they were completely unaware of this aspect of the problem.

They were like me. They thought they knew all there was to know about rape and abuse.

As it turns out, we were all far from knowledgeable, and that needs to change.

We have to start working for the victims, not for the victimizers.

­— ewenning@indiana.edu