When do sex and violence go bad? Well, some would say immediately and honestly if you would prefer to keep your ignorance to the topic and believe it is just good ol’ party fun and the occasional song lyric, I can’t really blame you. However, if you start scratching the surface the plethora of information opens up like a hot spring. In spending less than 1o minutes researching rape I found some joke of an anti-rape contraption that was more offensive than funny (more on this in a minute), I found organization upon organization supporting rape awareness, anti-rape ad campaigns, brochures, websites, grassroots movements, artist contributions. You name it, it is out there. So why, if it is so prevalent, is IT so prevalent? Why are so many people still being raped? Yes, I did mean to say people. It is NOT JUST WOMEN. Women are still, by far, the majority. But men get raped to.

How many of you know a woman who has been raped? This question is posed often to people. They say that nearly everyone knows a woman who was raped. When was the last time you wondered if you knew a man who was raped? I do.

Rape is a violent crime. It is not about sex. It is about power. It is about control. It is about dominance. It is a symptom of a mental illness. It is the reptilian part of the brain running out of control. It is commonplace. It happens because sometimes ambiguity is easier to accept than distinction.

She said no. But did she? Do you really hear it? Did she really say it? If she is too drunk to say no, does that still mean no? Come on people, we have all seen the after school specials about this. We know what is right and what is wrong and what is ambiguous.

After a conversation this afternoon about the need for being proactive, I did my 10 minutes of research and discovered that we are being proactive. But what does that mean? We have great organizations like rapeis.org . There are ad campaigns like:

Anti Rape Poster

Though I appreciate the effort and the message. This seems to be one of those posters on the campus bulletin boards and on the walls in hallways that we all read a thousand times and just ignored. Just like do your monthly breast exam and get the flu shot.

There are good artistic voices getting the proactive word out. This is a moving slam poetry piece on poetry and feminism.

Or you can go the route that South Africa has gone with the Rapex anti rape device. Just looking at the thing and you can see why it is controversial. But as its challengers rightly point out, doesn’t this put the onus on the victim. When do we stop doing that? We do have a responsibility to protect ourselves from being victims. But does is have to involve putting teeth in our vagina’s? Apparently in South Africa it does. In Brazil they have all women police stations to deal with crimes against women. This is progressive. We certainly do not offer that in the US. Of course those police stations do nothing to prevent the crime. They are there because the government has accepted that the crime is inevitable and therefore should provide a more effective and protective way to deal with it. Well, they aren’t wrong. Not yet at least.

So why are our current efforts of being proactive so ineffective? Maybe we need a shock campaign to scare the issue into the forefront. This is a question to which I have no answer.