"President Barack Obama is launching an initiative to combat sexual assault, particularly on college campuses, turning the spotlight on a problem that has devastated millions of Americans yet rarely receives such White House attention." (Pickler, 1)
Applaud! Applaud! The White House Women and Girls committee created a memorandum to make awareness of the men and women, girls and boys who have been rapped or sexually assaulted in the United States. The memorandum states that colleges/universities is where majority of the incidents are occurring.
You hear this all the time but as we stated in class, we need to educate ourselves about the situation and make a change. So I decided to look into Texas Christian University Crime database to see what is happening on our campus. With a glance, it looks like we have some sticky finger thieves, marijuana users, and lots of intoxication. Typical... but within the past two weeks we already have two cases of sexual harassment.
This leads me to wonder. What is the purpose of the crime alert emails if we don't get any alerts about these crimes? Who picks and choses what we should know? How are suppose to be aware about things and educate ourselves about protecting ourselves if we are getting emails about men yelling at women to "get into his car" or men who "slap the upper thigh."
I will admit. I laughed but then it angered me because this doesn't encourage women to speak, it encourages women to sit back and let things happen because of the fear of humiliation through these crime alerts. "As we participate in social systems, we are shaped by socialization and by the paths of least resistance. Furthermore, we make social systems happens." (Johnson, 70)
Let's educate ourselves and change our social system.
*** "Attention!" and "crime" are hyperlinked! ***
I'm glad you chose to highlight sexual assault, as it is (and has been) one of the largest issues on college campuses that receives little attention. As the issue is so large, and impacts nearly every university in the nation, I'm really interested to see what President Obama's initiative will be, and if it will actually work. At first glance, the complexity of sexual assault seems to be something that is beyond the reach of federal policy, but hopefully the initiative will be as successful as possible.
ReplyDeleteI have plenty of more thoughts about this issue (especially at TCU), and I'll likely explore them in my blogpost next week.