Start Early to Change the Culture of Sexual Assault

Thanks to Harvey Weinstein’s disgraceful behavior, my Facebook feed is overflowing with stories from women who have faced harassment, assault, rape, intimidation, and overall inappropriate behavior from the men in their lives.  Here is a random sample taken just now (paraphrased to respect privacy):

Me too.  When I was 17 I was assaulted and got pregnant, and decided to abort the pregnancy.

Me too.  My supervisor at work pulled me aside and whispered to me about how his beard looked like a glazed donut after giving oral sex the night before. I was so shocked; I didn’t know what to say.

Me too. My first semester in college a guy came up to me and told me: “I’d like to f*ck your hair.”  I had never had anyone say anything like that to me before and it made me feel dirty.  

The #MeToo campaign has made it safe to speak out about things that many women had never told anyone before.   It is stunning to me how many of my friends have stories to share, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  I didn’t post my “me too” story on Facebook, but like almost every woman I know, I have several too.  

I am grateful that so many women are gaining catharsis for these painful events in their lives.  And I’m grateful for the attention the media is paying to this underreported scourge.   But after the buzz around the topic runs its course, as it always does, we need a plan to make sure the next generation of young women doesn’t grow up to share their “me too” stories too.  

With problems as pervasive as sexual assault and harassment, there is a tendency to think nothing can be done.  Changing cultural norms is hard and incredibly slow.  But I am a big believer that if you reach people early enough in life, you can set them on a different course.  And so we need to do a better job in this country to educate young people about consent, starting as early as we can.  My own kids go to a school that takes the topic of sexual education and consent very seriously.  One of my sons even told me, as a middle schooler, that before he has sex he is going to get a written contract granting consent.  He since then has developed a more nuanced perspective, but the conversations the school was having with my children about consent is not at all the norm.

I don’t remember much about sex ed in my day, but I’m pretty sure a discussion of consent wasn’t a big part of it.  I grew up alongside men who felt it was their prerogative to keep pushing and trying, hoping to wear their partner down.  Better education regarding sexuality, healthy relationships, and what consent means can do a huge amount to change behavior.  And yet most kids in the US have no sex education around informed consent in their schools.  Only 24 states and the District of Columbia even mandate that sexual education is taught in public schools.  In the schools that do teach sex ed, 23% of public school sex ed teaches abstinence only. According to a Guttmacher Institute survey, 39 states stress abstinence and only 20 require discussing condoms and contraception. Very few schools discuss consent, even though students say this is one of the primary areas they want to learn about in sex education at school.   

Kids start thinking about sex in middle school or earlier.  It is such a mystery and only the lucky ones come from homes where sex is discussed openly.  Most get some information from their peers, but more and more are getting their information about sex from the internet.  It terrifies me to think of boys learning about sex by watching pornography.  The balance of power is all wrong, and informed consent and real intimacy are absent.  Girls, too, get their sex education from porn, although not as much, and it can be equally damaging.   This college student, quoted in What Girls See When Watching Porn, states it clearly: “I think porn makes women believe that they need to be really confident and sexy and moan and be loud, when in real life it’s OK to fumble, and it is important to communicate throughout the moment so that each person has an enjoyable experience. Porn makes women believe that it is not OK to ask questions towards their partner and that everything has to run smoothly for it to be sexy for their partner.”

If schools aren’t going to talk to kids about informed consent, then we need to find another way to do it, because it is clear that we aren’t doing a good enough job of educating our children about how to respect the opposite sex and see them as equals, not conquests.  Harvey Weinstein said in his public apology following the charges of assault against him: “I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.” But looking at the recent Facebook posts from women my age and younger, it is clear that the subsequent generations haven’t done much to change that culture.  We owe it to our daughters and our sons to do better