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Opinion | Society needs to reevaluate, transcend 'victim blaming' of sexual assault victims

Rachel Sacks, Columnist

In a world where rape and sexual assault are considered "ugly" or taboo words, it is surprising that our society is so insensitive to the victims of these crimes.

The average woman is taught to do so many things to prevent being assaulted or raped.

She should hold her keys in her hand with one key protruding between her knuckles, just in case she needs a weapon, have pepper spray on her key chain and should never walk in an unknown area alone - day or night.

She should cross to the other side of the street when a man is coming toward her, take self-defense class and assertiveness training class, lock the front door and the back door, never set her drink down in a bar or a party and never accept a drink from a stranger.

And of course, she should never flirt or get drunk because if she does and a man rapes her, she was asking for it.

She wanted it. How can we expect the man to stop himself?

When I hear people talking on this campus about how, "this girl at Brick was dressed like a total slut, she was asking to get raped" or that, "I totally raped at Halo," I am disgusted by not only the perceived notions society seems to have of the relationship between how a girl dresses and her sexuality but by the casual use of the word rape.

And yes, I have heard these before while students casually walked to and from class.

Rarely do people truly understand the severity of the word "rape."

The actual act is traumatic and violent and should not be used as a colloquial term of humor.

According to the York University newspaper Excalibur, Toronto police officer Michael Sanguinetti told university students at a campus safety information session that women can prevent being sexually assaulted, "by not dressing like a slut."

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The Toronto police merely perpetuated the myth and stereotype of "the slut," and gave victims even less of a reason to go to police for the belief that she will be blamed.

This advice prompted the students and faculty to ask for an apology from the Toronto Police Service 31 Division, and further led to the creation of SlutWalk.

According to the SlutWalk Toronto home website, SlutWalk was founded in early 2011 by York University students Heather Jarvis, Sonya Barnett and Alyssa Teekah.

The organizers encourage victims, friends and family of victims and those against victim blaming to join the protest marches that have spread to Canada, the United States, Europe, parts of Asia and Australia.

The goal of SlutWalk is to shift the model of mainstream rape culture that seems to focus on analyzing the behavior of the victim rather than that of the perpetrator.

Participants choose various ways to dress, ranging from garters and lace bras to jeans and t-shirts, and choose to share their personal stories of rape and assault.

Many had signs or experiences where they were wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and were raped.

This raises a few questions.

Were they asking for it?

Can we still put blame on these victims simply because of how they were dressed?

And most importantly: can we exclude these women and say that they were an anomaly, but still shame the women who did choose to dress in an explicitly sexual way?

The scenario of victim blaming occurs much too often, where victims of rape or sexual assault are being held responsible for the crime and told what they did wrong.

If a man did as much as a woman does to prevent assault he would be diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

But not a woman.

She's being smart, doing what she's supposed to do.

I don't know about anybody else, but I am tired of holding the responsibility in the way I dress and where I walk. I am tired of holding the responsibility just because I am a woman, and that's just the way it goes.

Why don't we try to change this set-up, where women are powerless and told to watch their every move simply out of fear of being raped or assaulted?

Why don't we start with changing the dialogue that is in our everyday society, the one that puts women in a corner and tells them stay put for fear that someone may hurt them?

These efforts are not being raised to simply let women run around wild and behave what is deemed as typically inappropriate.

Instead this is to fight for our rights to live free of violence, victim blaming and sex shaming.

We should change the message we send out from one of "don't get raped" to "don't rape."

Our worth as human beings is not determined by our sexuality.