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By Root 322 0

and domestic violence. If someone went to the emergency room after being assaulted—and this included women, men, and kids—I would go in and stay with them while they were in the hospital and try to make their time there as smooth as possible. It’s one thing to hear about rape statistics or to talk about domestic violence as some faraway, abstract thing. When it’s in your face—or in your life—the reality of violence is overwhelming. This is something that we can’t let devolve into another after-school-special issue that people talk about but don’t address head on.

Violence against women is one of those things that we kinda deal with all the time, but not in a substantive way. I mean, how many TV movies will you see (Lifetime addicts, I’m talking to you!) in which women are victims of rape or domestic violence? Shit, there are television shows dedicated to addressing the horror of sexual crimes—think Law & Order SVU. We have V-Day, a reinterpretation of Valentine’s Day, when organizations bring attention to violence against women on Valentine’s Day. We’re taught about rape in school. Domestic violence is a well-known problem. It’s not like these are issues that people don’t know about. So you would think that we would be making leaps and bounds in dealing with violence against women. But it’s just the opposite. We’re so accustomed to seeing violence against women that it’s become normalized. We accept it as an inevitable fact of life, rather than an epidemic that we need to fight on a large scale. And that’s not okay.

Rape/Sexual Assault

When I was in college, a teacher once said that all women live by a “rape schedule.” I was baffled by the term, but as she went on to explain, I got really freaked out. Because I realized that I knew exactly what she was talking about. And you do too. Because of their constant fear of rape (conscious or not), women do things throughout the day to protect themselves. Whether it’s carrying our keys in our hands as we walk home, locking our car doors as soon as we get in, or not walking down certain streets, we take precautions. While taking precautions is certainly not a bad idea, the fact that certain things women do are so ingrained into our daily routines is truly disturbing. It’s essentially like living in a prison—all the time. We can’t assume that we’re safe anywhere: not on the streets, not in our homes. And we’re so used to feeling unsafe that we don’t even see that there’s something seriously fucked up about it.

Perhaps the most screwed-up thing about women living by a “rape schedule” is that it’s not all that effective. We assume that if we’re going to be attacked, it will be by some random crazy jumping from behind a tree. But, as I mentioned, that’s just not the case. According to a 2004 National Crime Victimization Survey, almost two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone the victim knows: a relative, an acquaintance, a friend—even a lover.1 Perhaps you’ve heard this before, but I think it’s too important not to repeat. Because this is the statistic that shows just how “normal” rape is in the United States. It makes us feel better to think that we’re safe, that we’re okay if we protect ourselves from the boogeyman perv on the subway or in the bushes. Maybe it’s just too difficult to acknowledge that as it stands, we’re not safe anywhere. Yeah, I’m a downer. And I’m not done.

In 2006, Bush appointed Mary BEth Buchanan to head the Office on Violence Against Women, whose claim to fame was spending $12 million on prosecuting people who sold bongs. So yeah, real qualified.

That same government study shows that every two and a half minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and that one in six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. (Keep in mind, rape is one of the most underreported crimes, so that statistic is likely too low.) For young women, the numbers are even worse. Eighty percent of rape victims are under thirty years old; 44 percent are under eighteen. Even worse, young women are much less likely to get help if they