One in Five

If you look out at the courtyard behind Poe Hall, you’ll see a familiar sight to some students: The annual Take Back the Night display. According to the display, each of the red flags represents a woman on campus that will be raped, or 1 in 5. There’s something wrong with that statistic. Not the numbers, (or the fact that these numbers are only looking at women that are raped, and ignores the fact that men are also raped), but the idea that people just “will be raped” as if no one is to blame. What if the statistic was flipped around? Each of those red flags represents a person on campus that will rape someone.

A lot of people just got really angry reading that. Why? We like to pretend that rape, murder and theft are things that just happen without acknowledging that there are people out there that do these things. Victims don’t cause rape. Walking alone at night doesn’t cause rape. Rape is committed most often by someone that the victim knows, in his/her own homes. Instead of encouraging this societal fear-mongering that says that rape happens randomly, and it is the night we need to take back, this whole program would be better served to remind all of us that we need to be careful who we chose to let in to our lives as friends, not as strangers. Stop reporting all crimes; rape, domestic violence, theft, hate crimes and murder, as if they “just happen.” It’s time to put the blame on the people that do these things, and stop hiding in the fear of something that will “just happen.”

Agnes DavisJunior, Psychology