Sex without consent is rape.
There’s a great article at Broadsheet, the feminist column over at salon.com, that gets to the core of the backlash against women rape survivors. Tracy Clark-Flory responds to the latest crappy journalism claiming that there’s no real sexual assault crisis on campus, that the very real and well-proven statistics simply represent women who consented to sex and then felt bad about it later.
Do women sometimes consent to sex and then feel bad about it later? Sure.
Does that mean sexual assault is rare? Uh, no.
I’ve taught self-defense and personal safety on college campuses for years, and we have to start every class with a lengthy and detailed discussion of what constitutes sexual assault. Sometimes we spend two sessions, that’s four + hours, on the topic. Even when groups of students are able to come to consensus about the definition of “sexual assault” (sexual contact without consent) they struggle with the definition of “consent”.
Most students I encounter believe the definition of rape is: “When a woman I don’t know is out alone at night, and she’s attacked by a male stranger who uses physical force and usually a gun, and who forces her to engage in a very specific sexual act, and she later reports it to the police.”
Actually, sex without consent is rape.
I’ll never forget the student who told me succinctly one night after our first class together: “I thought I didn’t know anyone who’d been raped, but now I realize that I’ve been raped.”