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Campus Sexual Violence: Student Activism & Rape Culture


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This is the the first in a four part series exploring the culture and issues within campus sexual violence.

Earlier this fall, nearly 200 people – students and community members, men and women – took to the streets in Athens, Ohio. It’s the second annual homecoming march of F Rape Culture, or FRC – an Ohio University Student Organization aimed at fighting campus sexual violence. The group publicly uses a four letter expletive in its name as a testament to how seriously they take the issue.

We hear the statistics. Multiple studies in the past decade show as many as 1 in 5 women are sexual assaulted in college. 1 in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives. FRC is just one group of student activists in a growing national movement fighting this issue.

Rape culture, sexual violence, gender-based violence. This is the language that many groups like FRC are using. But what does that mean? FRC uses Rape Culture as a blanket term to describe actions that fall under sexual or gender-based violence. It’s a culture where these behaviors are accepted as the norm. A culture where cat-calling and street harassment are acceptable or even encouraged. A culture in which we question whether or not victims of rape or abuse “deserved it” or “were asking it” They say that insular places like college campuses allow this culture to fester.

They say that many different factors make it more socially acceptable for men to harass women on the street or to ignore verbal consent to sex.

And understandably, they’re pretty upset about it. F Rape Culture’s Jessica Ensley. “For a long time, I was afraid to call what happened to me an assault. I was afraid to tell people because I was discouraged by the people I did tell. But coercion is not consent. being drunk is not consent. Wearing revealing clothing is not consent. Nobody is asking for it unless they actually f—king ask for it,” Ensley said.

F rape culture says that we’re taught very early on – through media and legal systems – that sexual violence is a normal thing, even a sexy thing. We’re taught that enthusiastic and verbal consent to sexual activity is too awkward or even impossible. But why do we do this? What makes sexual violence socially acceptable compared to other crimes?

Bekki Wyss, one of FRC’s members, said it pretty bluntly. "Welcome to patriarchy. we don’t value women as much as men, we don’t value men who engage in sexual relations with other men, we don’t value trans people as much as we value cisgendered people," Wyss said.

She said that in order to harass some one or commit violence against someone, you have to think of them less than a person. That’s the mindset FRC hopes to disrupt here at OU. At their rallies, F Rape Culture gives survivors of sexual violence an opportunity to share their stories publicly. They hope that by doing so, they help normalize these types of stories and empower other students who may feel guilty or shameful about being a victim.

Jesper Beckholt, shared their experience of being a survivor, as well as a non-gender identifying and pansexual person. "Many resources act as if women only experience sexual violence. Others are a barrage of men and women, boys and girls, he and she. I see myself nowhere and I feel alone. Even within the resources that exist for queer people, I see myself erased. I am not a gay man or a lesbian, I am not a bisexual man or woman, I am pansexual, and non-binary," Beckholt said.

In addition to sharing these experiences, FRC members read demands, calling for survivor response training for Athens Police officers and yearly mandatory consent education for all students. Just a year ago, the group demanded mandatory sexual harassment training for student workers, consent education for all incoming freshmen, and amnesty for victims who had been drinking underage at the time of their assault. All of those demands were met.

This year, one of FRC's demands is that Ohio University begin funding of the Ohio University Survivor Advocacy Program. It’s currently funded by a US Department of Justice grant set to run out next year. Bill Arnold is the graduate assistant for Bystander Intervention and was the acting director of the program up until about a month ago. He focuses on how rape culture works to conceal serial offenders. He said that only 5 percent of the college population commit 90 percent of rapes on campuses. And that doesn’t really make sense. "What is it that is preventing all of these people who are in theory standing between 1 serial perpetrator and 1 potential victim from intervening. What is it about our culture which discourages intervention, which functions to conceal these people,” Arnold said.

He said that groups like FRC make it less intimidating to be that bystander. These students are working to force these people and these issues out in the open, to begin a critical conversation about the decisions we make and what we accept as okay. So it’s clear that rape culture and sexual violence are deeply engrained within different parts of our society.

But what does that mean for survivors?

This is the the first in a four part series exploring the culture and issues within campus sexual violence.