Women are subject to disproportionate rates of gender-based violence and harassment including sexual assault and intimate partner violence. One in four women will experience sexual assault in her lifetime. What can we do about this? We can promote consent education, what that looks and feels like. And women need safe forums where they can talk about sexual encounters and be taken seriously as narrators of their own experience, whatever terms they choose to use. Women who have survived a rape, whether they call it a rape or not suffer lasting effects. Not acknowledging rape when it happens is not a sign that it didn’t happen. It is a sign that we do not have the adequate language for communicating the complexity of sexual violence. It’s a double crime. It denies a women of agency when the encounter is unwelcome and denies her the agency a second time in the construction of her own story.

 

 

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf

 

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