Do You Talk To Your Kids About Rape? (ideas, games, girls)
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Yeah... these lowlifes were taught that NO means NO too. But part of their defense was that the girl never said no, so it was consensual.
Tough to say no when you are unconscious.
Thanks for teaching yours more than NO means NO!
No problem, Pitt..... believe me, they got taught a WHOLE lot of stuff. In fact, they probably heard a hell of lot more than they ever wanted to hear. Yeah, some of our talks ended up with them saying, "OMG Mom, I would NEVER do anything like that. Why would you even think you need to talk to me about that!?" Um....because!
^^^.....One of the things my children were NEVER allowed to do, was go to parties. Am I a control freak? You know, I'm quite certain that a few of the other kids and parents thought so. I certainly heard plenty of, "Oh Mel, going to parties is all a part of high school. Kids have parties. It's not fair to deprive them of attending them with the other kids."
My comments, in response, went something like this....
"Um, you DO know that the drinking age is 21, right? Yes? Well, do you also realize that we're talking about 15-18 year old children, right?"
"You do realize that I don't give a sh*t whether anyone agrees with my parenting decisions....for MY children, right?"
I was one of the toughest, street smart 18 yr old gals out there. In fact, at age 18, I'd been on my own (since 16), had been married and was in the process of getting divorced. I got raped. yeah.....ME. Didn't press charges, because in those days, YOUR judgement and character was completely doubted.....I mean, why would you put yourself in a situation, where you COULD be raped! Oh wait!! Isn't that kind of what THIS girl is going through? Yeah, it must have been consensual...if those guys said it was....right?
You better believe that my children were raised with some serious frickin knowledge.....sons and daughter alike. My boys were warned (okay, THREATENED)....that they better never, EVER push a female to have sex or take advantage of them, because I would hunt them down and do whatever I could to help prosecute them. I made my daughter understand EVERY possible line that a guy would use...made her understand every possible out she could use to escape, every vulnerable spot a male has, every trick in the book to avoid it ever happening to her.
Alcohol avoidance was one of the KEY measures to keeping them ALL safe!
I applaud you for educating ALL of you children, Most parents will teach their daughters to be careful, but many don't talk to their sons about sexual assaults, what consent actually means, and that sexually touching another human being without their consent, or when they are incapacitated is a crime, and unacceptable behavior. It's not uncommon for a parent to be surprised that their son was involved in, or knew of a sexual assault, and did nothing.
People tend to think they have good kids who would never do such a thing, but peer pressure can make good kids do unthinkable things. Without proper education a kid could have fuzzy boundaries, and not realize what they are doing is wrong. It's very important to spell out exactly what consent is, and that any violation is a crime, as well as a horrible cruelty that any decent human must stand up against, and that you as a parent will not tolerate under any circumstances.
When our daughter was old enough, I told her about the football players in my highschool, and how they and the 'popular' girls would take inexperienced young girls out into the woods, to 'pop their --------'. The 'popular' girls would hold clothing over the young girls' mouths, to muffle their screams, at the critical moment.
It was a trashy, almost totally nonwhite community like Steubenville. But at least we were free of a certain religion which seems to encourage brutality and victimization/blaming of the vulnerable (while oddly overvaluing virginity). As a 'little Indian girl', I'm sure I would have been in line for 'deflowering' like that, had I not been so extraordinarily ugly.
So yeah. I clearly named athletes as a particularly dangerous group, when I told our daughter about the ways of the world. And even before I told her about sex, I told her about peer pressure and its link to substance abuse - about how 'popular' kids will exploit peer pressure to get you to drink or do drugs, so that they can get you to do other bad things.
In the metro where we lived at the time, there was an exclusive Episcopalian school - top prep school in the state. It had a culture of bullying, and a culture of jock worship. A girl at that school was first corrupted with drugs, then deflowered. She became a drug addict - Crack, I suppose. Her family threw her out. She ended up in an old fleabag motel on the old highway on the wrong side of the metro, basically being used by the football team at that school as their community prostitute. They "helped her out with expenses (bought her drugs)", in exchange for being able to use her for sex. This happened about the time our daughter was nearing the exploitable age, and I told her about it. Several of my friends told her about it, too.
Demian, a story by Hermann Hesse, was a revelation to me as a teen. In it, Hesse implies a dichotomy between The World of Light, and The World of Darkness. I used that dichotomy as a conceptual tool for teaching the kids what is wise and what is unwise. I told them (not just our daughter) that there were an awful lot of degraded people who would love to drag them down into the World of Darkness. And yes, I described the bad kind of sex, which is degrading - the kind where one person does things to another person, rather than the good kind where people do thing with one another in nondestructive ways.
And we spent a lot of time on the concepts of consequences and coercion.
So many stereotypes here, where to begin? Non-white? The boy who seems to have led the attack on this girl was white. A religion that espouses rape? Never heard of it. And jocks are dangerous? No, they aren't. The glorification of jocks is where the danger lies. My son's football team was a tightly disciplined group. They were required to do community service in order to play, so they built Habitat houses. My other son's baseball team was required to assist at the Challenger games for handicapped children.
To me, the ability to play at the varsity level of any sport is a gift. It is not an entitlement to flout the law and decency.
I am not downplaying your experience, and I realize some sports programs ignore the behavior of the "stars" off the field. But, a stereotype is just that, and unfair to the group as a whole.
So many stereotypes here, where to begin? Non-white? The boy who seems to have led the attack on this girl was white. A religion that espouses rape? Never heard of it. And jocks are dangerous? No, they aren't. The glorification of jocks is where the danger lies. My son's football team was a tightly disciplined group. They were required to do community service in order to play, so they built Habitat houses. My other son's baseball team was required to assist at the Challenger games for handicapped children.
To me, the ability to play at the varsity level of any sport is a gift. It is not an entitlement to flout the law and decency.
I am not downplaying your experience, and I realize some sports programs ignore the behavior of the "stars" off the field. But, a stereotype is just that, and unfair to the group as a whole.
It would be a mistake to think this can only happen with jocks, or that all jocks are going to be dangerous. Sport are not inherently bad, plenty of boys and girls play sports, learn much from the experience, and don't engage in violent behavior off the field. It's important to have early and consistent education, and not tolerating bad behavior just because someone is a "star."
One of my proudest moments as a mother was discovering, by accident, several years after the fact, that one of my son's college volunteer activities was with a campus rape crisis organization. His role was to go to fraternities & freshman male dormitories to present information and lead discussions about date rape and treating women (and others) with respect.
When I asked why he hadn't mentioned anything about it to us, he basically said that he didn't need any credit or praise for "doing the right thing".
He and many other members of his college rugby team were also "Volunteer Walkers". If female students felt unsafe walking on or near campus (generally late at night) they could call and a big, burly, totally vetted, male would walk them wherever they needed to go. This also made me very proud.
Keep in mind that "jocks" can be good people, too.
So many stereotypes here, where to begin? Non-white? The boy who seems to have led the attack on this girl was white. A religion that espouses rape? Never heard of it. And jocks are dangerous? No, they aren't. The glorification of jocks is where the danger lies. My son's football team was a tightly disciplined group. They were required to do community service in order to play, so they built Habitat houses. My other son's baseball team was required to assist at the Challenger games for handicapped children.
To me, the ability to play at the varsity level of any sport is a gift. It is not an entitlement to flout the law and decency.
I am not downplaying your experience, and I realize some sports programs ignore the behavior of the "stars" off the field. But, a stereotype is just that, and unfair to the group as a whole.
If you're talking about the one who looks like a male Rita Hayworth (before they bleached her hair, and changed her hairline via electrolysis, to make her look white), then I don't know what to tell you, hon. He's not much whiter than me (and I'm definitely not white), and he's not white enough to have gotten into a good country club, in the days before the Kennedy Regime.
Simply the fact that football players are required to do community service in order to play tells me a whole lot: none of it good. It's like beauty queens having a 'platform' in their pageant competitions for improving the world. May fool some people... May disarm some critics...
But maybe if I didn't traffic so much in 'stereotypes', my mind might be 'open' enough to believe that girls parade around in high heels and bathing suits in order to bring World Peace. And maybe I'd believe that America's Jock Culture is not a disease.
I have nothing against sports played for personal enjoyment and achieving fitness. But the culture that has arisen around organized sports is sick and dangerous.
One of my proudest moments as a mother was discovering, by accident, several years after the fact, that one of my son's college volunteer activities was with a campus rape crisis organization. His role was to go to fraternities & freshman male dormitories to present information and lead discussions about date rape and treating women (and others) with respect.
When I asked why he hadn't mentioned anything about it to us, he basically said that he didn't need any credit or praise for "doing the right thing".
He and many other members of his college rugby team were also "Volunteer Walkers". If female students felt unsafe walking on or near campus (generally late at night) they could call and a big, burly, totally vetted, male would walk them wherever they needed to go. This also made me very proud.
Rightfully proud, you raised a good man!
Raising good men who respect women is just as important as raising careful women who respect themselves. Far too many rape victims did everything right, they just happened to have the misfortune of encountering a bad man.
So right, detschen and germaine, what a blessing your son and his mates were/are.
I have been so blessed to have a husband who has always shown such a great level of respect for women and has always taught his sons to do the same. I am also blessed to have sons who refuse to condone disrespectful behavior from other "friends" who do not respect women and..sons who choose their friends wisely.
There really are good men out there. Unfortunately, there are bad men out there as well...and many of those bad men were RAISED, and/or were influenced by not only bad men, but bad women as well. I have met many a woman, who truly have no respect for their own gender, and in fact, DO condone their sons treating women very disrespectfully. That is so sad.
For those who think that athletes are the problem ....
How many stars continue to support Roman Polanski? It's not the "jocks" that are the problem, it's the culture of entitlement to ANYONE who is popular and influential.
But the culture that has arisen around organized sports is sick and dangerous.
So is the stereotyping of people who participate in organized sports.
I've been around athletes all my life. From Little League players to men who have played pro football and baseball. Painting them all with the same brush is tremendously unfair to a LOT of decent men who would not even dream of participating in that "party".
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