White House Calls 1 in 5 College Women Raped “Complex” and Calls for More Surveys
Actually, It's Very Simple: We Need Revolution!
By Sunsara Taylor | May 5, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
At the end of April, the White House announced with much fanfare the results of a 90-day investigation into sexual assault on college campuses. The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault portrays the epidemic of sexual violence against women on campuses—1 in 5 women will be raped or sexually assaulted while in college—as some sort of complex mystery, and puts great emphasis on more months and years being spent conducting surveys and trying to better “understand the problem.”
This is bullshit.
It is NOT a mystery why college men rape college women.
First of all, it is widely known among those who study sexual violence on campuses that while most men do not commit rape, most rapes are committed by men who rape multiple times. In fact, a 2002 study found that—according to the behavior described by the men themselves—most men who had committed rape had done so more than once and that these repeat offenders committed an average of 5.8 rapes each! From this fact alone it is obvious that if campuses took the simple step of actually removing men who committed rape from their campuses, they could immediately prevent the vast majority of sexual assaults. Instead, it is more often the women who leave school—traumatized not only by the assault, but by the institutional protection given to their rapists.
Even more fundamentally, it is hypocrisy of the highest order for the administration to scratch its head at the “complexity” of the epidemic of rape on college campuses as if it is entirely unconnected to the pervasive and unrelenting epidemic of rape and violence against women that saturates every dimension of the society and culture it presides over.
College men—like all men and boys in this society—have grown up in a culture that treats women as if their greatest—or only—value is being sexually attractive and available to men. They have been socialized from an extremely young age by pornography, where the sexual degradation, humiliation, rape and even torture of women is displayed as something titillating and “sexy.” They have grown up under a legal system where, when women report rape, it is more often than not their credibility, their sexual history, their attire at the time, and their judgment that is put on trial and where, more often than not, rapists are not convicted or seriously punished. They live under a system where the state itself—the courts, the police, the military, and the laws—are a concentration of the violence against women: 1 in 3 women in the U.S. military will be sexually assaulted; law enforcement officers beat their wives or girlfriends at a rate double that of the general population; and often the very officials who women are told to turn to for help are themselves purveyors of sexual violence against women.
None of this will be solved with more task forces or more surveys! Nor will it be solved by spreading “best practices” that take as a given the backdrop of a porn-saturated, reproductive-rights-denying, male supremacist society, and world.
All this must be ended—and can only be ended—through a total revolution!
And right now, as part of putting an end to this culture of rape and pornography and building up the strength to make this revolution and hastening its development, we need millions stepping forward in the fight to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.
Break the Chains! Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!
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