Speech Final Lucy Macfarlan

As I sat down to write this speech, I couldn't stop thinking about how, though I felt passionately about the issue of rape culture, I didn't really have a personal story to tell. I wasn't raped, I wasn't denied validation for my victimization, I wasn't ever hurt. But then I remembered a time a few months ago. I was walking down the street on campus when a group of rowdy college boys approached me, not really an uncommon occurrence for most women my age, never less, I got a little worried, they were hollering at me, asking me for my name, my phone number. Invading my sacred private life. and then came the real shocker: one of them reached down as he walked past and grabbed ahold of my ass(I use ass here to prove a point). shocked, of course, I wanted nothing more than to turn around and punch the the guy. but he was a drunk college guy, and I was just a girl, a girl who had been reduced to very little by only the unwanted touch of a strange man.

It was a moment that sucked and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but it isn't what proves my point. What proves my point is when I was telling the story a few days later to a friend and I said "I was wearing jeans and a t shirt! I was with 3 guys! why did he pick on me??" and I thought to myself absentmindedly, "I was dressed conservatively, I wasn't drunk, I'm not a slut, I don't deserve this." And then I realized the pervasiveness of rape culture in our society. even I, a dedicated and some might say radical feminist had allowed myself to think that anyone could somehow "deserve it."

Unfortunately, stories like these are not uncommon, take for instance the statistic that nearly 1 in 5 woman will be raped in her lifetime(national intimate partner and sexual violence survey). Taken alone this statistic is disturbing, even more unsettling however, is that 97 percent of these rapists will walk free(Rainn.org) Because this statistic includes women raped under the definition of "completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration" many of these women will not only be ignored, but will be chastised for not being more careful.

This trend of blame placed on victims of rape who have somehow done something "wrong" is common. All Too often, Police officers first ask the victim if she had been drinking, what she was wearing or other qualifiers that somehow make it more understandable that the rape would take place. This victim blaming behavior was a central aspect  in the highly divisive, high profile Steubenville rape case, in which a young woman was raped on camera while under the influence of alcohol(nytimes.com) and yet when discussing the case, many news casters lamented not what was taken away from the girl, but rather how sad it was that the careers of two promising young football players had been cut short by a mistake made with a drunk girl who had a reputation of being flirtatious.

Because the blame is so often placed on the victim as in this case and other famous cases like it, many young women who are raped under the influence of alcohol or have in some other way done the “wrong thing”, feel such shame that they fail to report the rape. In fact,only 40% of rapes are even reported, and because of our societal tendency to blame the victim, only about 10% of these reports lead to actual arrests(rainn.com).

        Rape is a violent crime. Rape is a violent crime that is all too often left for the victim alone to shoulder, and rape culture is allowing that to happen. Rape culture is blaming the victim, rape culture is denying the victim, rape culture is thinking that it is okay to sexually harass a woman on the street because you think that she is attractive, and it is when that woman wonders what she did to deserve what you did.

So what do we do? How do we fix this plague on our society?

        We stop blaming victims. We stop telling women that they can somehow deserve violence for doing the wrong thing, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We stop shaming the people who are hurt, and we start holding  those who hurt them accountable for their actions.  And finally, we all have to change our own minds about ourselves and the people around us and remember that person doing all the "wrong" things "deserves" it just as little as someone doing all of the "right" ones.