In two different incidents over the past few weeks, male perpetrators have allegedly assaulted female students in Westwood.
As usual, the campus police responded by issuing warnings and safety guidelines cautioning students to avoid walking alone late at night.
This is certainly smart advice, and good old-fashioned common sense, but it will not stop assault, rape or sexual violence in general.
As UCLA prepares for today’s Take Back The Night rally, an event designed to raise awareness about sexual violence, we should be reexamining typical myths about the causes and solutions regarding rape and assault.
Society has ordered women to be careful and vigilant for decades, but men continue to rape us. According to the 2003 National Crime Victimization Survey, nine out of 10 rape victims are female, and according to the Justice Department, 97 to 98 percent of rapists are male.
So while women may, in rare cases, be perpetrators, and while men are sometimes victims, sexual violence is largely an issue of men using force on women.
Ironically, this is not what most media reports choose to emphasize. Newspaper headlines such as “a woman was attacked,” “women were assaulted,” or “girl was sexually abused” entirely erase the male perpetrator and shift the responsibility to the victim, where it doesn’t belong.
Sexual violence is not merely one unfortunate and inevitable consequence of human nature. It is explicitly political, the result of a prominent belief that men have the right to dominate and control women.
The myths surrounding rape and assault exist specifically to limit women’s personal freedom and autonomy.
We aren’t supposed to get drunk. We shouldn’t go out late at night. We better not wear revealing clothing. We can’t kiss a guy without planning to have sex with him. If we want to take a walk, we should find a male escort to protect us. If we don’t follow the commands of the paternalistic authorities, we are deemed naive and clueless, or girls who “asked for it.”
Such social prescriptions ensure that women operate according to what some feminists call a “rape schedule” ““ that is, we have to alter our daily lives out of the fear and awareness that we are potential victims.
Men are not instructed to do the same. Consequently, they may move freely through public space, a privilege that women are not granted.
Many people insist that women must simply cope with the “reality” that our bodies will always be targets for male violence.
But the obligation to prevent rape is solely that of the rapist and the patriarchy that enables, if not encourages, him.
Unfortunately, men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies is surprisingly widespread. In a 1986 UCLA study, a full 50 percent of male respondents said they would engage in behavior meeting the legal definition of rape if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.
The problem, then, isn’t that women are being careless or stupid; it is that so many men find it acceptable to treat us like objects and property rather than human beings.
Bleating the same “the drunk girl deserved it” line over and over again and wagging fingers at the girls who misbehave will not someday magically eliminate sexual violence. Neither will all the self-defense classes and cans of pepper spray in the entire world.
We need to recognize that assaults on women, like the ones that allegedly happened in Westwood, are hate crimes intended to make an entire population feel threatened and fearful. We need to teach men not to rape.
Cohen is a fourth-year women’s studies student.