HOW ABOUT A NEW POLICE CHIEF? A WOMAN POLICE CHIEF AND ALL THAT ENTAILS..? maybe put some focus on stopping Rapes and domestic violence. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IS TERRORISM.
BUT- the govt wont put the cash resources into this as they do for other crimes- imagine if the dept of Homeland Security was defunded; and all that huge pot of cash was put towards stopping CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN- HATE CRIMES ..- CALL IT HOME AND HEARTH SECURITY? Of course- throwing money at a problem wont fix anything, but what we have now status quo- just isnt working..
COMMUNITY VOICE
Why are we willing to say 'Don't drive drunk' but not 'Don't rape'?
Latest News
- Google Maps turns into Pac-Man's chomping grounds; Headwaters Park 8:44 am
- Vera Bradley Outlet Sale continues to be a boost for Northeast Indiana economy 8:24 am
- Why businesses are speaking out on religious-objections laws12:55 pm
- Garrison Keillor Omnibus lecture to be full house 11:15 am
- Canterbury's Maggard is 2015 Girls Basketball Player of the Year 11:28 am
- Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels 'heartsick' over religious objections fallout 12:50 pm
- Singer Joni Mitchell hospitalized in Los Angeles 8:37 am
Monday, March 30, 2015 - 9:26 am
April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. We’ll talk about prevention, “victim-blaming” and “rape culture,” but too often our efforts do as much to perpetuate the problem as to raise awareness. Think what it would be like if we approached the issue of drunken driving the way we do sexual assault.
Imagine that we kick off Drunk Driving Awareness Month by educating sober drivers how best to avoid being injured or killed by drunken drivers. Here are four excellent tips:
• Buy a safe car. Smart cars are not smart when it comes to surviving a crash with a drunken driver. Avoid all black, gray and dark colors that might not be fully visible to drunken drivers. Big red and yellow vehicles are best. Firetrucks and school buses are seldom hit by drunken drivers.
• Don’t drive at night. Or on holidays. Or any time or any place where someone might decide to drink and drive.
• If a vehicle approaches you or seems to be following you or driving slowly in a way that requires you to follow them, stop your car and call for help.
• Stay home. Also, make sure that you do not live near a road or especially near an intersection where drunken drivers may come at you from multiple directions.
We would want to interview people who had been seriously injured by drunken drivers. We would sympathize with their pain, but our greater interest would be learning from them what more they might have done to avoid being the victim of a drunken driver.
To be fair, we would want to interview an equal number of those who have been falsely accused of driving drunk, including those stopped at law enforcement checkpoints with no probable cause, then made to submit to a breath test when all they’d had was a drink or two with dinner and they knew they were fine to drive. Or what about those pulled over, perhaps with probable cause, but who have done nothing wrong and are just too tired and want to get home?
We would never spend a whole month talking about drunken driving without saying, “Don’t drink and drive.” That’s the whole point. We start there and end there and focus our energy on encouraging people not to commit that crime.
But since the very first National Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April 2001, have you ever seen a campaign that started or ended with, “Don’t rape”? Why is that? Why are we so comfortable telling people not to drive drunk and so uncomfortable telling people not to rape?
We could start with tips like:
• Don’t assume that everyone you come into contact with wants to have sex with you.
• Talk to someone you want to have sex with the way you would talk with a friend about ordering a pizza together (see Al Vernacchio’s excellent TED talk “Sex Needs a New Metaphor” available at https://www.ted.com/;talks/al_vernacchio_sex_needs_a_new_metaphor_here_s_one?language=en).
• Treat all people with human dignity.
• Never rape anyone.
These are all good tips, but even these miss an important truth. Sexual assault is not the result of miscommunication in the heat of passion. It’s not even about sex. It’s about power — one person’s desire to dominate another. Sex is neither the motive nor the objective of the rapist. Instead, sex is the weapon. And it’s still a very powerful weapon in our society, protected by silence and shame on the one hand, exploited by the entertainment industry and the marketplace economy on the other.
The vast majority of rapists are men, and the vast majority of victims are women and children precisely because our society has traditionally empowered men and disempowered women and children. Everything in our culture that objectifies women and keeps them in their traditional subservient place furthers the current rape culture, domestic violence and sex trafficking.
When it comes to sexual assault, perpetrators and victims cross gender lines, but they never cross power lines. The person with the most power is the perpetrator, and the person with the least power is the victim.
Let’s stop telling victims what they can do to prevent sexual assault and start educating ourselves and our children on what rape is and how to prevent it.
Laurie A. Gray, JD, is a former prosecutor, an adjunct professor of criminal sciences at Indiana Tech and the co-author of “The ABC’s of Sexual Assault: Anatomy, ‘Bunk’ and the Courtroom.”
It's a good thing you put the fictions of “victim-blaming” and “rape culture” in quotations, as they are but the propaganda of the victim advocacy community and not supported by any empirical studies.
The real analogy to drunken driving is to encourage young college women not to engage in the drunken hookup culture that almost inevitably leads to next-day (or next month) regrets and cries of "rape".
Equity feminist Camille Paglia has offered this advice to young women: “Don’t get drunk at fraternity parties, don’t accompany boys to their rooms, realize that sexual freedom entails sexual risks, and take some responsibility for your behavior. This might once have been called common sense (it’s what some of our mothers told us); today it’s called blaming the victim.”
The real analogy to drunken driving is to encourage young college women not to engage in the drunken hookup culture that almost inevitably leads to next-day (or next month) regrets and cries of "rape".
Equity feminist Camille Paglia has offered this advice to young women: “Don’t get drunk at fraternity parties, don’t accompany boys to their rooms, realize that sexual freedom entails sexual risks, and take some responsibility for your behavior. This might once have been called common sense (it’s what some of our mothers told us); today it’s called blaming the victim.”
No comments:
Post a Comment