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Equally diverse
People often ask the victims, if you got raped, “why didn’t you report?” I found the real question is why would they report? Victims are not reporting not because they don’t want justice, most of the time it’s not even because they’re scared, it’s because reporting is equally as bad if not worst as staying silent. In order for students to change and force their institutions to see and accept the violence that exists in American College campuses, they should know their rights and what their entitled to. For a student to change how things work in his or her campus they should educate themselves on how to file a Title IX complaint in order to be taken seriously by their school. Students shouldn’t be afraid to report, even if that means including a third party such as a lawyer. All of the statistics mentioned above should be no less than another reason for things to be different and victims to report.
Some may argue that universities do take action. They do, paying 20 cents or being expelled upon graduation are great examples of universities taking matters into their own hands. This is why its so important for institutions to stop rape culture, its because a huge chunk of where this culture comes from is exactly from there. Its a key factor for institutions to promote the idea that a girl can walk safely in her own campus without fearing someone will attack her and it all being her fault. There are a lot of faculty members that can get involved and help change this mentality. The school’s staff can start by listening to the victims and having her back. Fellow students can help spread awareness and support to someone in trouble. Small acts like such can do great things to contribute to the fight of stopping rape culture and changing this mentality.
Institutions can be held accountable for the assaults and rapes through visibility groups that acknowledge the problem, support groups for the victims, and by starting to demand justice for the victims and consequences for the aggressors. If universities start giving more importance to supporting what their students need instead of focusing on their image, we’d be telling a different story. It is so important in a process like this that the school has the victim’s back. When schools start promoting gender equality and awareness of rape to everyone involved in it’s community, people will know how to act when presented in front of a situation like this.
In conclusion, the institutional body helps to perpetrate rape culture, how so? People start to observe rape as something not blameworthy and it keeps occurring while the victim keeps getting blamed. What we need to do is to demand for it to stop and to never blame the victim of something that’s clearly not their fault. They don’t need society and rape culture to remind them that “that’s not how it goes”. There are a lot of people willing to help but again there’s still room for improvement. Something as small as the institution that they love supporting them could save so many lives and could stop so many sexual assaults from happening.