Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Either words matter, or I've been assaulted

Say what?  Here's what; an article that notes that the famous statistic of "one in five college women has been sexually assaulted" derives from research which includes forced kisses and groping as sexual assault. 


Now I'm not a fan of either forced kisses or groping, but having experienced both in college, I'm going to have to guess that it differs in character and impact from things like date rape and forcible rape.  In my case, a young lady decided that since I was a runner, my thighs were fair game for Roman hands.  I removed her hands and said "no", and that was that.  Another time, I did something kind (I forget what, maybe killing a spider or something) for a different young lady, and when I responded to her "thank you" by noting it was nothing, ended up with a peck on the cheek.  In her defense, she made clear that a peck on the cheek was all she had in mind, and I still cry laugh about it today. 


Yes, I'm not a very good victim, and to be sure, young ladies (gentlemen) whose lips were mashed and body manhandled by a drunken frat boy (s-girl)  had a much more traumatic experience than did I.   Even so, however, these overly broad descriptions of misbehavior don't do those who are genuinely traumatized any good, since we end up looking for a lot of perpetrators who simply don't exist.


And in the process, we fail to convict perpetrators who are very, horribly real.

2 comments:

Hearth said...

And we leave our younguns completely ignorant of how to avoid real rape.

Bike Bubba said...

Bingo. If everybody is a perp, nobody is, and that makes figuring out who's really bad news tough.