Activity #9

I used several statistics during this assignment to portray violence against women. When I had my conversations with my interviewees, my first statistic was that rape victims are 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide and 13 times more likely to actually make a suicide attempt. The second statistic that I used was that 95 percent of reported sexual assaults are against females, half of all females raped are under the age of 18 years old, and about a fifth are under 12 years old. The third statistic I used was that about 70 to 80 percent of campus rapes generally involve alcohol or other drugs. The fourth statistic that I used was that sex slavery has around 200,000 sex slaves worldwide and their slaveholders have an annual profit of 10.5 billion. The last statistic that I used was that it is estimated that in 90 percent of cases in where children are raped it is by someone they know.
The interviewees were very surprised by these statistics. One of the boy interviewees told me a story about a girl in her high school that had to get a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend who had hit her a couple of times. Another interviewee stated that they have been watching the television series Women behind bars lately. They explained that most of the women that are shown on the show were victims of incest or rape, often times by their own fathers or close relatives, and they are in jail because they attempted to kill or killed their sexual offenders.
My interviewees thought there could be a couple of causes of violence against women. One of the causes they came up with was drugs and alcohol. Another cause was that maybe it is becoming very familiar because it is so common now and people either don’t feel like it is a big deal or they don’t think that the woman will report it. Another idea for a cause was that maybe the women don’t realize that they are leading the offenders on. Lastly, they thought that maybe a cause was that people do not consider it rape if they are married.
My interviewees thought there were a couple of things that you could do to eliminate violence against women. The first idea was to organize a violence awareness activity on campus to make sure that everyone was aware of it. Someone suggested that they could pass out pepper spray around the drill field with some facts attached to it. Another idea was to send out letters door to door to get the facts across. However, most of them thought the best idea to get the facts across was through television. We get the most influence from television and the news so they thought that this would reach the most people. They think that the shows on WE TV and other stations are good and that the shows should be increased. They also stated that maybe comedians and funny shows should make fun of people that involve themselves in violence against women so that people do not think that it is a good thing.
This activity was definitely eye-opening. I was very surprised by a lot of the statistics and it made me sad to think about. Overall, I think it was a good activity to do because the word needs to get out and there should be more things going on to make sure that people are aware of violence against women. As a woman, this activity was very frightening because the chance that I will be a victim of one of these crimes is very high.