Last week two residents of Madison, a father and a son, were charged with the repeated sexual assault of a child. The young girl later confirmed to investigators that the assaults occurred multiple times over several years.
Sexual assault, a grotesque and chilling subject, is becoming all too common within the city of Madison and here at the University of Wisconsin. Just within the past three months, campus has seen multiple sexual assaults. One in particular involved a college-aged woman being thrown to the ground, kicked and groped by a middle-aged man.
In broader terms, sexual assault is one of the most undocumented and heinous crimes in the U.S., with more than 60 percent of incidents going unreported, and only three out of 100 rapists serving jail time, according to the Department of Justice. The prevalence of these crimes spike drastically in especially unregulated and hierarchical social structures, namely, the military. Today, female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be raped by a fellow man in uniform than killed by enemy fire.
An even more troubling aspect of the root of sexually violent crimes is the reasoning held by the offender, in other words, their mental and moral justification. Multiple U.N. studies have found the leading motivation for rape or sexual assault is sexual entitlement. Internationally recognized sociologist Michael Kimmel adds to this, finding that many sexual assault offenders commit these crimes in an effort to elicit dominance, thus exerting overpowering violence as a means to release anger and feelings of inferiority or lack of control.
Sadly, the underlying attitudes revealed in these cases expose, yet again, the depth of misogyny within American culture. The idea that women must accept domination and subordination, and even worse, keep quiet amidst life-shattering experiences reaches far into basic American functionality. The careful examination of these deep-seated cultural notions reveals a much darker and fundamental sinister inclination among many men in our current society.
This is the same inclination that has led to the tolerance of rapists and the silencing of hundreds of thousands of victims within the U.S. military. The same inclination caused a 41-year-old man to blame his 13-year-old sister-in-law for “predatory” and “sexually enticing” actions leading to her subsequent rape, and again, this same inclination caused two residents of Madison to sexually assault an adolescent girl for years.
The scope of these perceptions can be seen even in the most naive of statements, and is exhibited clearly in a Wisconsin student’s call for more guns and more guys in his recent letter to the editor. Would a college female really be better off walking home with a drunk frat star packing a .45? Common sense comes to the rescue when answering questions like this.
The reinforcement and strengthening of almost indoctrinated gender roles within American society is evident throughout history, ranging from Minor v. Happersett to Roe v. Wade, and can be identified within every sect of American society, from religion and family structure to healthcare and the workplace. The claim, still prominently heard from Catholic and Baptist churches across the country, that homosexual parents are somehow inferior to a traditional couple, and are thus detrimental to a child’s development, represents the very notion every schoolyard bully would hold behind their name-calling of a young girl or boy with two moms. This therefore perpetuates a vicious circle of castigation. In another light, it somehow seems perfectly acceptable for politicians in Washington D.C., men who come from backgrounds of comfort and readily available wealth, to make the most basic healthcare decisions for 18-year-old, pregnant and impoverished women living in the Bronx. And, almost satirically, the embarrassing representation of gender discrimination within the workplace remains painfully prominent, as in 2011, female full-time workers made only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 23 percent.
It is, and has always been, ingrained within the very fabric of our culture, that women are, by nature, emotionally erratic and fundamentally inferior, and must maintain a submissive attitude of docility and obedience. This notion, mixed with a culture infused with violence as a means of attainment, brews the perfect storm for the justification of a regression in thought process and the subjection of half our population.
Grant Hattenhauer ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in biology.
