This year, we haven’t talked all that much about Sexual Assault Awareness Month. There are a lot of great resources already out there, as well as here on Feronia, and since we talk about consent throughout the year, we’re happy to let the spotlight fall on more local, in-person events in April. But our SOURCE team put together an absolutely fabulous PSA about consent last month, and I’m really excited to share it with you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhtEPs8AWvg&feature=youtu.be
(There’s also a 15-second version for those of you who want even quicker ways to explain consent.)
Every year, I run into a fair number of people who ask me why there are so many events for Sexual Assault Awareness Month – doesn’t everybody already know about this stuff? While it’s always (sadly) easy to show that we still have a lot of work to do in addressing sexual assault, the news last month brought a really good story out that illustrates just how invisible sexual assault can still be.
Jon Krakauer’s new book “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System In A College Town” explores a series of assaults connected to the University of Montana, but the meta-story is about how Krakauer was largely unaware of the scope of sexual assault in the U.S. before 2012, when a friend of his shared her story of being raped. When he started looking into it, he discovered that many of the other women in his life had similar experiences that he just hadn’t known of, and he felt surprised by it.
The fact that he found more women in his life who have dealt with this is unfortunately what you’d expect when you look at things statistically: 1 in 6 American women will be victims of attempted or completed rape in our lifetimes. But the fact that he was surprised is one of the most interesting parts of this for me.
Humans are known to be pretty bad at estimating the actual risks that are involved in lots of areas of life – it’s something that people involved in public health, economics, sociology and a whole host of other fields have been looking into for ages. But Krakauer’s description of what he went through shows that this was something even more basic – he hadn’t been considering this issue and deciding that it wasn’t likely for himself and the people in his life, he just hadn’t been considering it at all at a personal level.
And that’s a big part of why these events, PSAs, and other types of outreach are so important – these issues affect all of our lives, even when we don’t know that they do. And the more we talk about them, the more openings there are for people to share their stories, and help move us all towards a future when the statistics won’t be so bleak.
