Fueling the Fire

Fuelling the Fire.

    “She was asking for it.”
The amount of anger, stress and panic I feel when I hear these words is indescribable. The faith I lose in our society whenever they pass through someone’s lips as an excuse or defence makes me want to scream, but unfortunately our culture lets it be the difference between punishment and innocence for a man guilty of committing a crime that goes against all human rights, which we as a race are proud to say we support. A crime that breaks boundaries, wreaks havoc and destroys a person. An innocent person. That crime is rape. And our culture is encouraging it.

Knowing where to start when trying to argue over this issue is difficult but let’s start at the beginning – rape culture, more importantly ‘frat culture’. Currently 1 in 5 woman state that they have been the victim of an attempted or, more disturbingly, a successful sexual assault during college and it’s not hard to realise why. Fraternity culture is extremely powerful – the amount of confidence it instils in a student is remarkable, and also worrying. ‘Frat boys’, as the stereotype is known, are said to be arrogant, obnoxious, presumptuous and overly sexualised – unfortunately this is not untrue. The atmosphere of a frat house is intimidating, the attitudes of its occupants terrifying and their morals low, mix this with alcohol, drugs, and young girls intoxicated and it’s not difficult to realise that the outcome is going to be harmful, not just for the boys and their futures, but for the girls who get wrapped up in the problems. Of course female sororities have their own labels, but none of them cause danger to the boys that interfere with them. The college town of Missoula in Montana was given the nickname “America’s rape capital” due to over 80 reported rapes over three years being brought to attention, but what people soon discovered is that Missoula is not shocking, in fact its numbers are quite average, which causes a large issue to be raised – why...