When I was in my senior year of high school, my English teacher asked us to write an essay about a particular social issue of our choice. Many wanted to write about poverty, divorce, homosexual rights, etc. I, on the other hand, wanted to write about rape culture. When everybody had a topic to write about, my teacher made us say our social issue out loud so that everyone could make sure that they had a different one. When I said that I would be writing about rape culture, he paused for a second and said, "What?". Almost everyone in my class was looking at me like I said the most absurd thing. That is when it hit me that not a lot of people know what rape culture is. |
Rape Culture the normalization of sexual violence, the blaming of victims, and the lack of teaching people not to rape. |
"...a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm . . . In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable . . . However . . . much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change. Rape culture includes jokes, TV, music, advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery, that make violence against women and sexual coercion seem so normal that people believe that rape is inevitable. Rather than viewing the culture of rape as a problem to change, people in a rape culture think about the persistence of rape as “just the way things are.” wavaw.ca/what-is-rape-culture