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Documentary

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Stay involved with the Filmmakers Take action with It's On Us

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White House Campaign

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The mission of It's On Us is to build the movement to combat campus sexual assault by engaging all students, including young men, and activating the largest student organizing program of its kind in grassroots awareness and prevention education programs. If you or a loved one is in need of extra support at this time, please know that you are not alone.

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"5 Ways Sexual Assault is Really About Entitlement"

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"5 Ways Sexual Assault is Really About Entitlement"

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Salon News

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Last week, when Emily Yoffe wrote an article suggesting the pragmatic value of telling college-age women to avoid getting drunk, many people, including me, viscerally objected to the victim-blaming essence of the argument. I have teenage daughters. I completely understand wanting to make sure they are safe and happy. And I think that unless you are advocating to end sexual assault in ways that address systemic solutions and don't perpetuate victim blaming then you are part of the problem, not the solution. If we are serious about preventing predatory sexualized violence, and the alcohol abuse in its service, then we have to spend our time finding ways to achieve profound changes in the way we educate children. Articles like Yoffe's are not only useless for the purposes of preventing sexual assault, but actively harmful because they distract us from having conversations about central issues: cultural entitlements and a deficit of empathy.

Alcohol and sexual assault are highly correlated on college campuses, but sexual assault is not a function of alcohol abuse. It is widespread and clearly it's a function of power and entitlement. Sexual assaults on college campuses don't take place spontaneously in a vacuum. The reality of assaults happening on campuses is a symptom of a much larger and ugly one that has nothing to do with alcohol and who consumes it. People in altered states, all kinds of altered states, act in ways that are culturally informed.

First, sexual assault on college campuses happens in environments of overwhelming cultural and institutional tolerance that support discriminatory double standards. While the overall rate of sexual assault in the US has declined since the late 1970s, it has stayed constant on US campuses. The Center for Public Policy and the Department of Justice estimate that 95% of college sexual assaults are not reported because victims, regardless of sex, gender or sexuality, do not have confidence that they will be believed, that their schools will help them and that they won't be humiliated and shamed. Our culture essentially gives rapists the message that they're entitled to be believed and respected; their victims aren't.

Since women's basic right to bodily integrity seems to confuse some people, let's talk about sexual assault that involves men and boys. Decades of Catholic Church sexual abuse tragedies, the Boy Scouts, Penn State, rape in correctional facilities, sexual assault in the military, recurring episodes at high schools around the country are all examples of entitlement to rape in the face of institutional tolerance.

These cases all involve situations where people, usually men, with uncontested power use that power to abuse more vulnerable people. Their victims are vulnerable not only because they are smaller or younger, and certainly not because they are drunk, but because they lack cultural power - the power to be believed or have their rights of bodily integrity respected by society. Sometimes, those people are children; other times they're men. Much more often, however, they are young girls and women. Alcohol only highlights deeply rooted ideas about who has the right act with impunity. As Jaclyn Friedman explained five years ago, drinking "is not a risk for nearly half the population. I've never met a straight man who worried about being raped as he contemplated a night of debauchery. Vomiting in public? Yes. Getting rejected by sexual prospects? Sure. Getting in a fight? Maybe. Getting raped? Come on."

A false accusation of rape is, indeed, a fearsome prospect. But the likelihood of being falsely accused of rape are no different from that of being falsely accused of any other crime. And women are far more likely to be raped than men are to be falsely accused. The insistence on treating the two as equally prevalent issues is ....an entitlement.

Secondly, sexual assault on campus is related to high rates of other forms of gendered violence on campus. Gender-based violence includes not just sexual assault, but intimate partner violence and stalking. College-aged women are at highest risk for all of these forms of violence. Decades of research and work clearly reveal that the defining characteristic of perpetrators of these crimes is entitlement. Perpetrators are people who believe they are "owed" something because of who they are or what they've done are the most likely to commit difference-based violence.

Third, people arrive at college with ideas and experiences. According to a study released earlier this month, one in ten people between the ages of 14-21 have already committed an act of sexual violence. Boys are more likely to have been perpetrators, although the older girls get, the more likely they are to become perpetrators too. However, 80% of victims in the study were girls -- 18% were boys and 5% were transgender youth. Three quarters of those admitting to using coercion or physical pressure targeted someone they knew or were in a relationship with. 15% said they used alcohol to do it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the study however was that these children felt no sense of responsibility for their actions. What does this have to do with entitlement? The likelihood of perpetrating sexual violence was not equal across all groups. The teenagers with the highest propensity to sexually assault a peer were white kids from higher-income families.

Fourth, we cannot talk about sexual assault and broader violence in schools without discussing athletics, both before and during college. While male student athletes make up 3.3% of the U.S. college population, they are responsible for 19% percent of sexual assaults and 37% of domestic violence cases on college campuses. In the wake of the Steubenville rape case, but before so many others, like the more recent case in Maryville, The Nation's Dave Zirin called for a serious questioning of "the connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture." The core characteristics of high-status boys' sports - violence, dominance, power, specialness and impunity - are married seamlessly to the marginalization and sexual objectification of girls and women as trophies and playthings. It is possible to cultivate a healthy sense of fraternity without the denigration and victimization of girls and LGBT youth, but that's not what's happening.

For the last 25 years, while the incidence of rape has declined, gang rapes by younger and younger men have been on the rise. And perpetrators now derive even greater power and status from photographing and sharing evidence of their assaults. What does entitlement look like, if not being so confident you'll get away with a crime that you crow about it on social media? Sports participation does NOT turn boys into rapists. However, participation in high-level, all-male sports cultures is correlated with sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

Fifth, people come from families and families are riven with similar problems and not talking about them. Boys and girls are being sent off to college without parents ever discussing critical dilemmas, double standards, power imbalances, cultural entitlements, or even what it genuinely means to be empathetic. It's not just parents who themselves are struggling with alcohol, abuse and dysfunction that are a problem. It's parents whose reluctance to speak openly about serious issues with children who also enable these problems to thrive. People arrive at school with complicated histories shrouded in silence, shame, anger and incoherence. Our reluctance to extend our concepts of justice to include the family spills over into other institutions every day and college is one of the places where this is most evident.

A No More study released last month revealed that 73% of parents with children under the age of 18 have never talked to them about sexual assault or domestic violence. They don't talk about drinking either. Put those together? In 1988, 28% of ninth graders surveyed in a Rhode Island study answered yes to the question, "Does a man have the right to sexual intercourse without the woman's consent if she is drunk?" In 1998, the number was 24%. These numbers are too high and there is no reason to think that number is significantly lower today. Too many teenagers are never taught what rape actually is. Concerned parents need to be encouraging their children's schools to teach students about stereotypes, to challenge gender roles perpetuate male entitlement, and to teach comprehensive sex education that includes lessons about enthusiastic consent.

Ultimately, the only way to end our ridiculously high rates of sexual assault, which would, after all, have the excellent effect of also reducing the chances of false accusations that parents worry about - is to educate children about justice and care in age-appropriate ways starting when they are young and to help them understand pervasively toxic media messages. This doesn't mean sitting a five-year old down and explaining gang rape in graphic terms during a special kindergarten class. It means difficult conversations and developing thoughtful curricula that inculcate children with empathy, respect for others and a responsibility to care not just for themselves, but also for others. By the time teenagers are exposed to sex ed, they should already have a strong commitment to treating other people well. Of course, this all assumes parents who agree that sexual assault is preventable and that empathy is an important values. And too many don't. There are all kinds of entitlement involved in that equation.

The point, as Yoffe herself points out, is not to shut down difficult conversations. The point is to have them, in depth, with the people who will be most affected themselves, years before college is even a possibility. I don't know what child goes to college not understanding that alcohol abuse will impair their ability to function. But I do know that we are sending children into a world where they are not treated as equals. That's not feminism's fault. It's the fault of a repressive and normatively biased culture intent on conserving a destructive status quo. One that has been telling women to avoid rape, to no success, forever.

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5 ways sexual assault is really about entitlement

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Last week, when Emily Yoffe wrote an article suggesting the pragmatic value of telling college-age women to avoid getting drunk, many people, including me, viscerally objected to the victim-blaming essence of the argument. I have teenage daughters. I completely understand wanting to make sure they are safe and happy.

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"Why Don't College Students Report Sexual Assault? Because The Think Nothing Will Be Done"

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"Why Don't College Students Report Sexual Assault? Because The Think Nothing Will Be Done"

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Bitch Media Magazine

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Photo by Wolfram Burner (Creative Commons)

As students head back to school this month, they should be worrying about what classes they'll get into, who their teachers are, and whether they'll be overwhelmed by homework. But one thing no student should have to worry about is whether they'll be safe on campus. Sadly, that's not the case: As we know all too well, roughly one in five college students is sexually assaulted during college.

A new, in-depth study from the American Association of Universities sheds some light on that "one in five" number. The group surveyed 150,000 college and graduate school students to get data on who is most vulnerable to sexual assault on campus. The report looks at the experiences of female, male, and transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming students from 27 schools in the United States.

The numbers are not good: Rape is at epidemic levels in schools across the country. Having data will hopefully help college administrators understand the patterns of sexual assault that exist on campuses, build a better understanding of who's victimized, and lead to solutions for how to stop rape altogether. The report found that people are most at risk for sexual assault when they first get to college-rates of assault are highest among freshmen and drop year-by-year. Also, no surprise, women and trans/genderqueer people face much higher rates of sexual assault than men. Altogether, by the time they're seniors, 33 percent of women and 39 percent of transgender/genderqueer people report being a victim of nonconsensual sexual contact at least once.

While the public conception of sexual assault is, sadly, still rooted in the idea that rape has to involve some kind of brutal physical force, the survey asked about three kinds of sexual assault: rape that involves physical force or incapacitation, rape that involves a lack of affirmative consent, and rape that involves coercion by threats or persuasion. Over their years in college, between 20-25 percent of women and trans/genderqueer students say the experience a sexual assault that involves physical force or incapacitation-like being held down, threatened with a weapon, or having someone assault them when they're asleep or drunk.

"Affirmative consent" is a concept that's still often misunderstood, despite work that advocates have done to reframe the conversations about rape from a "no means no" sensibility to "yes means yes." Numerous colleges have adopted "yes means yes" consent policies into their official rules and California passed a law last year requiring all colleges to define consent as "an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity." But a recent survey showed that many college students are still uncertain what constitutes consent. For example, 47 percent of college students surveyed last year believed that a person taking off their own clothes showed consent to have sex, while 49 percent did not. This new report from the American Association of Universities questioned students about assaults lacking affirmative consent by asking if they'd ever experienced a situation where someone "initiated sexual activity despite your refusal, ignoring your cues to stop or slow down; went ahead without checking in or while you were still deciding; or otherwise failed to obtain your consent." With this explanation, 14.8 percent of undergraduates transgender and genderqueer undergraduates, 11.4 percent of undergraduate women, and 2.4 percent of undergraduate men said they experienced sexual assault due to a lack of affirmative consent.

At the University of Oregon, students planted one red flag for each of the 3,000 students who would be assaulted, based on national statistics regarding sexual assault on campus. Photo by Wolfram Burner.

Another reality the report captures is that when people do experience sexual assault or harassment, they're not likely to report it anywhere. While a majority of people (63 percent) thought that campus officials would take reports of sexual assault seriously, fewer people (49 percent) believed that it would be "very likely" for a fair investigation of the assault to occur. At the same time, only 30 percent of students said they are "very or extremely knowledgeable" about where to get help if they or a friend is a victim of sexual assault. So there's a both a lack of information about the system for reporting sexual assault and a lack of trust that justice would actually result from a report. Only about 25 percent of people who were physically penetrated during a sexual assault decided to report the attack, but most people who didn't report the assault said it "didn't seem serious enough." Fully one-third of victims of forced penetration did not report the attack because they were "embarrassed, ashamed, or that it would be too emotionally difficult." Almost as many students said they "did not think anything would be done about it."

These attitudes make clear how our culture of victim-blaming massively impacts real peoples' lives. Far too often, survivors are put through a wringer if they report being assaulted, facing stigma, incredulity, and bureaucracy. Not only should students not have to worry about rape on college campuses, they should feel confident and assured that if something horrible does happen to them, they will be supported by their college to seek healing and justice. These numbers should be a wake-up call to college administrators that our culture needs to change dramatically-if a student is assaulted, they shouldn't be too embarrassed or afraid to report it.
Related Reading: I Show My School Spirit By Working to End Sexual Assault.

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Why Don't College Students Report Sexual Assault? Because They Think Nothing Will Be Done

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Photo by Wolfram Burner (Creative Commons) As students head back to school this month, they should be worrying about what classes they'll get into, who their teachers are, and whether they'll be overwhelmed by homework. But one thing no student should have to worry about is whether they'll be safe on campus.

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"Schools Reporting Zero Sexual Assaults on Campus Not Reflecting Reality, Critics, Students Say"

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"Schools Reporting Zero Sexual Assaults on Campus Not Reflecting Reality, Critics, Students Say"

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CBC News Canada

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Performed at the Oscars

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Music Video on YouTube

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Lady Gaga - Til It Happens To You (Official Music Video)