I read an article over the weekend about a high school girl who killed herself after she got drunk at a party, some of the boys at the party stripped her and wrote slurs all over her body, took photos of her and circulated them via text and Facebook.
The article talked about a major switch in our culture where the high school boys didn’t see this as a sexual assault, they saw it as a prank. I’m not so sure they thought it was harmless, but they certainly didn’t consider themselves guilty of anything so serious as a sex crime.
I wonder what has happened that young men don’t understand the difference between a prank and assault and feel that if a female is too drunk to protest that whatever happens to her has her implied consent.
Factor in that so much of this activity now gets documented and passed around, as if it’s all a joke, and it makes me so glad I didn’t grow up in an era of smart phones or Facebook or social media. With texting and Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, a kid can never get away from the bullying. Her home is no longer a refuge.
This girl’s story is starting to sound very familiar and the article mentioned several other high school girls who had similarly killed themselves after they were so humiliated by circulating photos of them in compromising positions that they couldn’t figure out a way to face their classmates.
A few days ago was RAINN Day 2013. Rainn, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, is an anti-sexual violence organization that assists victims of abuse and seeks to educate to prevent further abuse.
For RAINN Day, more than 300 college campuses participated in programs that highlighted the pervasiveness of sexual assault among college kids.
RAINN operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, a network of more than 1000 local rape treatment hotlines, that ensure that a victim of sexual abuse has someone to talk to 24/7.
Oct. 7: RAINN
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