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Last week a female resident reported a sexual assault against her in Gannett Hall. I am always disgusted to hear about incidents of this nature not only because the act of sexual assault is incredibly disturbing, but also because it seems to happen every semester. Sometimes it’s sexual assault, sometimes it’s unwanted sexual touching and sometimes it’s sexual harassment. Whichever it happens to be, I am consistently horrified by the news and some of the reactions I observe.
Instead of questioning how a person could commit such a reprehensible act, I often hear questions like “what woman in college doesn’t lock her door at night,” “didn’t she know better than to go to a party all by herself” and “why would she dress that way if she didn’t want that kind of attention?” I sincerely hope I’m not alone in seeing a huge problem in this kind of thinking.
It isn’t that I don’t think women should take steps to protect themselves; I personally can’t go to sleep without knowing that my front and bedroom doors are both locked. For a person who lives on campus – where you sometimes don’t know everyone on your floor, let alone the rest of the building – the risk could be even higher. No, the questions make me angry for a different reason.
More often than I’d like to admit, women are blamed for the sexual abuse that happens to them. Upon hearing about the abuse, people often want to question what the victim could have done differently instead of immediately feeling angry that a woman was physically and emotionally violated.
Insisting that a woman “should have locked her door” or “shouldn’t have dressed like that” after an assault has happened is ignoring an important issue: a crime was committed against a person. The implication that the victim holds any responsibility for being assaulted assumes that she was asking for – or deserved – what happened to her. This is completely untrue, as well as insulting.
When the blame is placed – partially or wholly – on the woman violated, I see it as an insult to men as well. It assumes that it is in a man’s nature to rape, and that when a woman doesn’t take precautions, she may as well be covering herself in meat and walking into a tiger’s cage. This is a deeply ignorant implication.
Men are not wild animals. They feel love, think abstractly and make choices. A man who rapes is still a man because he made a choice. He isn’t a beast who can’t control his barbaric urges; he is a man who made the conscious decision to ignore human decency in favor of participating in a heinous act of violation.
Significant efforts from campus groups, such as the Safe Campus Project and the Student Women’s Association, inform women and men about how to better protect themselves from being targeted. While instances of sexual assault and other reprehensible acts still occur, the work that these groups do is important because they address problems and help students on campus.
We’ve created a culture that’s focused on prevention. As a result, we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that rape isn’t an uncontrollable force in the nature of men. Committing rape is a decision that some men – and women – consciously make. While prevention is necessary to keep people safe, it is inexcusable to lay any blame on a victim of this crime. Ultimately, the reprehensible choice is the choice to rape, not the choice to leave a door unlocked.
Alicia Mullins is a fourth-year women’s studies major.
Bangor Daily News