The Nuances of Sexual Assault and Consent

Over the past week, students have attended the consent workshops initiated by HAVEN and the University of New Hampshire. When I walked into my workshop last Friday, I expected the workshop leaders to regurgitate information we already knew. I assumed it would be an hour-and-a-half long lecture about why sexual assault is wrong. 

I was pleasantly surprised. HAVEN did, indeed, explain what consent is, but they also talked about the broader scope of sexual assault, along with a couple other topics that I had no idea they would even touch.
For example, my group was given a scenario in which a male victim of sexual assault didn’t report his assault, and we were asked to come up with reasons why. To that we responded that because the victim was male, he might be scared to be seen as weak. We then talked about the existence of toxic masculinity. This came as a complete shock to me, because no real effort is put into fixing toxic masculinity in our culture, even though the perpetrators are sometimes called out for doing the wrong thing and suffer personal repercussions. Today, prevention of toxic masculinity lies solely in the hands of individuals who are willing to call others out for being toxic, because when we talk about sexual violence, most targets are females. So it was refreshing to hear someone give a talk where they mentioned toxic masculinity in the same breath as sexual violence against men. However, something else about the workshop caught my attention.

Our conversation centered around a story where a woman was sexually assaulted by her crush. Once the story ended, we were asked a question. The question asked us who we thought was to blame for the rape. Of course, the blame is 100% on the rapist. 

However, the workshop leader went on to tell us that sometimes, he’s witnessed people place the blame on the female as well as the male. Some reasons those people would give are extremely well known, and if you’ve read any news articles with quotes where people blame sexual assault victims, these reasons should be familiar. Reasons like, “well, if she hadn’t been dressed that way, maybe it wouldn’t have happened,” or “she never technically said no.” 

This conversation then moved on to the topic of rape culture. We talked about why people seem to think that they are entitled to sex: maybe because people don’t tell them otherwise, or because society has romanticized sex (you know, the “I cook dinner for you, you have sex with me” stereotype). 

I was surprised. I’ve never really had a lot of deep conversations about this; usually, we just talk about what consent is and why it’s so important, so it was important to hear about how rapists can be enabled by a greater culture. 

One of the biggest issues with sexual assault is that people feel entitled to do it, which is a problem very rarely addressed. One big example that comes to mind is the CBP’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez group chat, a chat where border patrol officers have posted extremely inappropriate, fake pictures of AOC. When this chat came to light, there was uproar for about a week, and then—radio silence. As far as I know, there was no real conversation about this. 

Sure, we talked about why they felt they could engage in this activity, but there was never any follow-up, and this is one of the reasons why I think sexual assault is as big of a problem as it is. As a culture, we attempt to educate people on how to behave around others, but we never correct the actions we take that allowed those people to behave poorly in the first place. 

All I’m asking for is for people to talk more about toxic masculinity or entitlement, and also to take action against that sort of behavior. Otherwise, we’re only fixing half the problem.