By Christabel Airo
In a world where everything is shining and everything looks perfect, there lies the most painful secret, bitterness and the thirst of revenge.
Sexual violence is treated as the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults.
It’s not just about sexual violence itself, but about cultural norms and institutions that protect rapists, promote impunity, shame victims, and demand that women make unreasonable sacrifices to avoid sexual assault.
Rape culture pressures women to sacrifice their freedoms and opportunities to stay safe, because it puts the burden of safety on women’s shoulders, and blames them when they don’t succeed.
How often do we publicize rape cases or suicide? We are all raised in a silence suffering generation. This makes the generation to be full of pain, agony, bitterness and then need to quench their thirst for revenge.
The rape culture has been embraced to appoint where the boy child will also suffer but silently.
And although rape culture has its roots in long-standing patriarchal power structures that were designed to benefit men, today’s rape culture burdens men too for instance, by ignoring the fact that men can be victims of rape and sexual assault, and women can be perpetrators of it.
That means that male victims are also left without legal protection and social support.
Rape and suicide occur everywhere and every day. The major places are colleges, Universities, Workplaces, Prisons and even at home.
The impunity isn’t limited to the legal system. Schools, universities, and the military routinely fail to address sexual assaults within their institutions.
All of these institutional failures are magnified by social pressure on victims to stay silent and by patterns of blaming or ostracizing victims who do come forward.
The result of all this, unsurprisingly, is an environment in which rape is common, victims are silenced, and rapists are not punished.
But there is a less obvious, more pernicious consequence as well: rape culture polices women’s lives, constraining their freedom and limiting their opportunities.
When the burden of avoiding sexual assault is placed on women that essentially grants sexual predators the power to set the boundaries on women’s lives.
Those who don’t are held responsible for their own fate.
Most of the rape victims are always commit suicide as a way of dealing with the shame, pain and pressure.
All of this happens because of negligence, arrogance, ignorance and irresponsible leaders and parents.
Rape culture allows rape to flourish. But it also makes it hard to measure which itself makes rape more common still.
The difficulty of accurately measuring rape and sexual assault is not just the result of rape culture, however. It also contributes to it.
The lack of complete, reliable data masks the degree to which rape and sexual assault are widespread.
That means that energy and resources that could be better spent coming up with solutions to rape culture are instead spent litigating whether it’s a problem at all.
A charge such as that made against the defendant, in this case, is one which is easily made and, once made, difficult to defend against, even if the person accused is innocent.
Therefore, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the female person named in the information with caution.
And just as those fears haven’t changed much over the centuries, neither has the solution: to limit men’s vulnerability to rape accusations by limiting women’s ability to bring rape charges.
This used to be done more openly than it is now, but the parallels to modern responses to rape accusations are striking.
The government needs to pay more attention to the problem of sexual assault, and there is some evidence that assaults are increasing and it is seen from the recent stories in the media.
Similarly, there is every need for the government to enhance and establish a good task force to address the problem of sexual assaults on campus, although it is too soon to know what effect it will have.
