{"id":14900,"date":"2014-04-29T20:51:06","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T00:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2014\/04\/29\/14900.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:10:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:10:11","slug":"not-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2014\/04\/29\/not-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger happened to read the opening paragraph of Jennifer Steinhauer’s article White House to Press Colleges to Do More to Combat Rape<\/a> in the New York Times<\/cite> this morning:\n

Reacting to a series of highly publicized rapes on college campuses, the White House on Monday released guidelines that increase the pressure on universities to more aggressively combat sexual assaults on campus.<\/blockquote>\n

Over at Salon<\/cite>, Mary Elizabeth Williams refers to “a series of high profile cases” in How the White House can fight the college rape epidemic<\/a>. Better would be something like reacting to a series of highly-publicized leaks of previously covered-up or ignored rapes<\/i> or following a series of failed cover-up attempts at prestigious schools<\/i>.\n

Nick Anderson in the Washington Post<\/cite>, however, gets it closer to right:\n

The Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, which President Obama formed in January, is spotlighting an issue that has gained widespread notice in the past few years because of allegations of sexual violence at prestigious schools such as Amherst College in Massachusetts and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.<\/blockquote>\n

Probably even better would be finally gained widespread notice in the last few years despite every attempt by authorities to keep this sort of thing quiet<\/i>.\n

Sexual assault is common on our campuses. Let me repeat that, because the newspapers and websites don’t seem to be saying it: Rape is common. Every week, every state, big campuses and small, public and private, there are young women and men attacked, and we let it happen.\n

The new government website that created the “news” under the headlines is called Not Alone<\/a>, referencing Our Only President’s speech back in January<\/a>:\n

My hope and intention is, is that every college president who has not personally been thinking about this is going to hear about this report and is going to go out and figure out who is in charge on their campus of responding properly, and what are the best practices, and are we doing everything that we should be doing. And if you’re not doing that right now, I want the students at the school to ask the president what he is doing or she is doing. And perhaps most important, we need to keep saying to anyone out there who has ever been assaulted, you are not alone. You will never be alone. We have your back. I’ve got your back.<\/blockquote>\n

And, you know, that’s all great and stuff, and well-done O.O.P., but I’m afraid when I look at the name of that site, I’m just thinking that those people who have been assaulted are not alone because there are so fucking many of them. Thousands and thousands of them, assaulted at my campus, at my alma mater, at yours, the one your sister went to, the one your daughter goes to, the one down the road. It’s not a series of rapes<\/i>, it’s that rape on campus is the norm.\n

And even worse than that…we have all been permitting it, participating in rape culture. Telling women that it isn’t really rape, or that they shouldn’t ruin a young man’s future, or that it was all a misunderstanding. Or pretending that it isn’t happening, certainly not here on this<\/i> campus. Or that rape is rare, something done by extraordinarily evil men who are nothing like the guys in class or in the dorm or in our club. Those newspapers are contributing to rape culture, even as they are undoubtedly congratulating themselves (as YHB is whilst typing this note) on fighting it.\n

In fact, what I will have to tell my daughter, as she goes off to college in a few years, is that—it’s true, you are not alone, you will never be alone.\n

You are surrounded.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is writing a blog note, so that’ll fix everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14900"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16619,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14900\/revisions\/16619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}