#9: Argument and Counter Argument

I am arguing that college campuses help normalize and encourage rape culture on a collegiate level and then a national level. My research questions are how does rape culture exist on college campuses and does it contribute to rape culture nationally and/or globally? And where did rape culture derive from? I believe that rape culture still continues to thrive on the idea of victim blaming, hookup culture, Greek life, and social media. I intend to answer my initial research question using statistics, articles, cases, and studies based on those four categories to prove that college campuses are environments where rape culture is commonly seen. Rape culture is a widely known concept but that does not mean everyone agrees that it exists to the extent that I and many others do. An article called It's Time to End 'Rape Culture' Hysteria from Time's opinion section where the author thinks rape is not a cultural norm so rape culture doesn't exist. She writes that activists demand we need to teach men not to rape but claims that we've already been doing this because boys have been getting prevention messages all their life (Kitchens). I disagree with her overall article that rape culture isn't as a big a problem and especially with this claim. If boys have been getting prevention messages their whole life, why are they still raping and sexually assaulting women? I don't know what prevention messages they've been receiving but "boys will be boys", boys are mean to girls that they have crushes on, sexualizing young girls in front of them or in the media, "what did you do to make him hit you", women should be nice and submissive, boys shouldn't show emotions, "you throw like a girl", etc are indeed contributing to rape culture. Most people might argue that some of these examples are completely harmless, such as "boys will be boys", that boys have a crush on a girl they pick on, and "what did you do to make him hit you", but they give subtle messages about sex and consent. Boys will be boys is a phrase used to excuse boys' behavior and blame it on the fact that he is a boy. But boys are definitely capable of respecting peoples rules, bodies, and possessions. When boys hear this phrase, they believe that their bad behavior is okay, that they are above the rules, and that they simply cannot control it because they are boys. It is not okay to teach young children that when a boy is mean to a girl, it means he likes her. We should not be teaching kids that love and affection are related to suffering and pain because they might equate the two when they get older and enter into the dating world. Pain does not equal love and that message gives both young boys and girls the wrong idea about what love and affection should look like. Lastly, "what did you do to make him hit you" introduces children into a victim-blaming ideology; it teaches them that a person can force someone else to make a bad choice and potentially harm the said person.  No matter what that person has said, violence is never an appropriate response. Asking that question to the person who got hit reinforces the idea that it was his/her fault she got hit, which can later translate into blaming the victim of a sexual assault from his/her alcohol intake, outfit, whether they were alone or not. etc. I personally don't feel that many young children are being taught effective prevention messages, and especially since the author did not provide any examples of those prevention messages to back up the claim. Many similar articles brought up how many rape reports are false accusations yet statistics show that less than 8% of charges are false, which means the other 92% were found to be true. Rape culture is real and continues to be normalized throughout college campuses, and the world and my paper will show why that is.

Works Cited 

Kitchens, Caroline. It's Time to End 'Rape Culture' Hysteria. Time: Opinion. March 20, 2014. http://time.com/30545/its-time-to-end-rape-culture-hysteria/

https://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/rape_culture_means/#