Everyone knows that in the American and Western culture, college is seen as a place where young people can explore themselves and others sexually. It’s a time in a persons life when they are given license by the community to find themselves and their sexuality. But, according to this article by WVTF Public Radio, the rate of women reporting sexual assault during their college years is one in five, an alarming statistic. The University of Virginia has created a conference in order to combat this growing problem. This isn’t just an issue of certain Universities with bad apples, this is a problem across the board, and schools are scrambling to find a solution. The idea behind this conference is to coordinate and communicate together in the hopes that sexual misconduct can be curbed.
I’ve heard stories, mostly in the media, about fraternity brothers who bring girls over, get them incapacitated with alcohol, and have sex with them when they reach the point where they can no longer realize what’s happening or even say no. It seems that people will turn a blind-eye and say, “boys will be boys,” or something lame, but that is a situation where a woman is being taken advantage of and many times, legitimately raped. And I’ve always thought that the majority of students held this same apathetic perspective, but it was encouraging to see in this article that students want to take an active role in fighting for the rights of women and seeing an end to this increased sexual assault.
I’m consistently surprised by the issues that are being talked about and dealt with in education. Even though this problem is taking place on campuses every year, I would’ve thought of this as a purely legal matter. It makes me wonder how I would deal with this issue as an educator. As a school, OSU has a great emergency response system in place across its campus. However, for more complicated issues with large quantities of alcohol involved, the response is also more complicated. I think there should be a hotline that students could call to report any kind of suspicious activity and/or confirmed assault.
No comments:
Post a Comment