A great response to the LA times article that we blogged about a couple days ago was written in the LA times today. The piece, written by SAFER board member, Nora Niedzielski-Eichner, directly addresses the problems with the article and the larger problems with sexual assault and sexual violence prevention and awareness programming that many college campuses face today.
In 2002, fewer than half of colleges and universities had sexual assault prevention programs, and the programs that did exist could have been as basic as a skit during orientation that half the freshmen slept through. This is an unacceptable failure to put resources into prevention, given the prevalence of sexual assault on campus. And sexual assault is a problem no matter what numbers you use - did MacDonald really mean to imply that rape isn’t a problem if it is only impacting one woman or two women or 10 women a month per campus? Multiply out those numbers, and I’d say that’s a pretty big problem.
Please go read the rest of the piece here.
Filed under: Sexual Violence
Dashaway
femmemeister
Bento
“And sexual assault is a problem no matter what numbers you use”
Exactly. While the exact numbers may be of interest to sociologists, unless we ever reach the day in which rape is almost nonexistent, exactly what the incidence of it is should not make much of a difference for everyone else. I mean, murders on an objective scale don’t happen very often, but no one would ever claim that means we shouldn’t do everything in our power to stop them. I don’t see why people use different reasoning when it comes to sexual assault.