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Aswad -> RE: Name who you would like to rape on campus (12/27/2011 4:57:09 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: samboct
[...] one in four women in campus will be raped is where that one's coming from...there were orientation classes that bring up that statistic to a bunch of young men [...] the boys look around and start wondering- OK, who's the rapist? [...] My comment- not a good educational tool.
This point cannot be stressed enough: it's a non-starter as an educational tool. I remember this statistic being presented to us back in school. The universal response was disconnection. Everyone was like "no fucking way", even the girls being incredulous about it, and we all tuned out everything else ever said about that topic for the next six years. It was that potent at demolishing any attempt at educating on the topic.
Epic Fail.
Hell, I don't remember a single word of those four hours after that. Yes, four hours in a single sitting, all on the subject of sexual abuse. I do remember one of the victims was kind of hot. Haven't a clue what she said, or how she said it, or what happened to her. 5'8" or so, early twenties, curly redhead, lots of freckles, cyan-grey eyes, D cup, nice bum. Not a word. Teflon coating. I remember her voice, and how it sounds when she's tearing up, but I can't remember her crying.
Now I can arrive at those figures myself with a back-of-envelope calculation, and it seems viable.
But back then... someone presented an extraordinary claim without evidence or a definition of terms, or indeed any other set of details or prepwork that might have set up the backdrop for actually grasping what was being said. A direct result of this was that anything else they said was wasted breath, and that girls got raped the next few years by boys that never thought of it that way and would've been horrified to grasp the implications of what they were doing.
One of them did grasp it, years later.
Sometimes, visiting the cemetary for other reasons, I wonder if there would've been two less tombstones with familiar names on them if more effort had been expended on teaching people the consequences of their actions up front, rather than slamming doors shut in their minds with shock tactics. And let's face it, that's what it is. The figures, even correct, are rightly shocking. Presenting them serves to invoke shock, not to prepare for facts.
In my experience, most males have a sexuality that is to some extent connected to power and conquest. Yet, also in my experience, most males don't want to hurt or harm women for no reason. Indeed, the vast majority appreciate women to the point where treating them well is a satisfying thing to do. Seems likely there's a disconnect between intent and effect that can be remedied with education on how to keep the effect in alignment with the intent.
The statistics are pretty clear that outright assault is a comparatively rare event, with a different perp profile.
That's a pretty large step up in my mind, at least, especially as regards intent and malice.
Nobody gains anything by conflating the two, which is what happens when one doesn't lay the groundwork before going ahead with the statistics. As you say, "who's the rapist?", that becomes the incredulous question. And when one has some notion that we're talking brutal sex at gunpoint by a stranger, the answer is obviously "nobody I know," and then the idea flies out the window. It is not exactly trivial to imagine a third of your buddies forcing sex from half the girls in the class by violent coercion. So it gets filed under "unbelievable propaganda to be disregarded", along with "you'll understand the reasons why round holes require square pegs when you get older" and "smoking weed results in nuclear bombs falling on your house".
[sm=2cents.gif]
Health,
al-Aswad.
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