By Gwen Frost
CW: Sexual Assault
Ending rape starts with unlearning the roots where it has taken hold. Keith Edwards gave a presentation called Ending Rape on Thursday, Feb 22 in the audience-packed Performing Arts Center Concert Hall.
Edwards has spoken at over 150 colleges universities in the past 15 years, ranging from topics of sexual violence prevention to men’s identity education.
“One in four college-age women have experienced assault or attempted-assault,” the screen read.
Edwards asked us to raise our hands if we knew someone who had experienced sexual assault. For those who didn’t raise their hands, he said “if you think you don’t know anybody, I assure you, you do. They just haven’t told you yet.”
Senior Hailey Lozano is an advocate for the domestic violence sexual assault services and researching sexual assault on campus, and felt that this one in four statistic was an “underestimation.”
“A lot of people have a hard time opening up,” said Lozano. Some people don’t even realize it happened to them, or they “feel like it’s their fault, so they don’t really talk about it with other people.”
There are four steps in responding to someone who comes to you saying they were assaulted, said Edwards.
First, make sure they’re safe, if there’s a possibility the perpetrator may hurt them again, or if they need to go to the hospital.
Second, Edwards asked us to believe them.
“Just believe the survivors,” said Edwards. “Most survivors start blaming themselves before anyone else gets the chance to.”
Repeat “it’s not your fault,” and empower survivors, Edwards concluded.
For women, men, and trans and gender non-conforming folks, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual violence, Edwards said.
“We need to stop seeing sexual violence as a ‘women’s issue’ and start seeing it as a ‘men’s issue’,” he said.
If an issue belongs to a demographic, does that mean it is this demographics responsibility to absolve it?
“It’s everybody’s issue,” said Lozano, after the speech. As a society, we have historically put it on women, but “having a discussion as it being a man’s issue has a very big implication that it’s not one specific gender’s issue.”
After looking over a list of acts that were legally considered assault, a group of college aged men were asked to check off those which they’d done, and “84 percent of these men didn’t believe their actions were illegal.”
But this “I didn’t know” logic isn’t enough for Edwards, nor for anyone else.
“No survivor is ever reassured by finding out that her perpetrator didn’t mean it,” said Edwards.
Edwards believes the problem lies within how boys and men are taught to engage sexually, their whole lives. Rape culture “encourages, condones, and teaches sexual violence.
“We literally teach men to rape women,” said Edwards. “We just don’t call it that.”
How we define masculinity by sexual conquest heavily contributes to rape culture. Feeling ‘not manly enough’ or emasculated often results in a need to embody stereotypical masculine characteristics, like domination and aggression.
“Not a single one of you feels man enough,” said Edwards. “But if you identify as a man, you’re man enough. Congratulations.”
After the talk, Senior Austin Clark shared how “growing up in high school, there’s these instances where you don’t feel like you’ve lived up to everyone else’s expectations as a man.”
Men being the primary perpetrators has “a lot with learning things incorrectly growing up, around obligations that we have towards women and sex,” said Clark.
Anecdotally, no one person has ever made an audience laugh so much during a conversation about assault. Edwards managed to make us at ease, yet attentive, and relaxed, but heavily aware of the pain we were discussing.
“In the words of Cornel West, ‘I am not optimistic, because the data is not good,’” Edwards said. “‘But I remain so hopeful.’ Because of you.”