The Consent Workshop Why We Need to Get Rid of Rape Culture.
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Rape Culture is society’s refusal to recognize the recent predatory behaviour exhibited by Kodak Black towards Young Ma, the trivialization of sexual assault and unwanted sexual advances in today’s society. It is an environment that allows sexual violence to occur and one that creates justifications for when it happens. Emi Boscamp for mindbodygreen.com, explains this as all the ways we teach women to prevent rape as opposed to teaching men not to rape. 

Society does not explicitly say “rape people”, but it informally educates and conditions us to see rape as a normalcy, even up to the point of making justifications as to why it happened. This is where the danger is. Once you have been conditioned to think something is normal, it is almost impossible to break out of that mentality.

Society has conditioned women to think of ways to avoid rape. We have mothers and older feminine figures, giving tips on ways you can avoid predators. You are told to change the way you dress, to be mindful of the places you go, and to make sure you don’t stay out past certain times. We hear stories of victims, and the first thing we think, is all the ways the said victim could have avoided that situation. This is why we still feel comfortable saying ‘there is two sides to every story’ after a survivor has shared a story of sexual assault. Rape culture has become so ingrained in our thinking that in most cases, we victim-blame without even realizing.

Rape culture promotes a toxic idea of consent. It is in thinking that when someone says ‘no’ to sexual activity, it implies a ‘try harder’. It is in accepting a coerced ‘yes’ as a greenlight for sexual activity, it is the entitlement to a woman’s body after paying for a date, it is thinking a woman is asking for ‘sexual passes’ or outright forcing yourself on a woman because of a sexy outfit.

If you make any kinds of excuses for rape, you are complicit in the toxicity that is rape culture.

We need to get rid of rape culture simply because no one person deserves to be raped. No one deserves to feel like they do not control what happens to their bodies, to have their choices stripped away from them. This is regardless of what was said/implied; how one looked or dressed. We need to get rid of rape culture because predators have carried on for so long in normal society like they do not deserve punishment for their atrocities. We need to get rid of rape culture because survivors need justice, they need to know that they have a choice on all matters concerning their bodies.

The Consent workshop aims at destroying elements of rape culture in today’s society. We started a petition for the creation of a sex offenders’ registry in Nigeria. We believe that by ensuring that predators have nowhere to hide under the law, justice is being served to survivors.

We are dedicated to collectively unlearning societal norms that have been endorsed by patriarchy, and Rape-culture is just the beginning.

The Consent Workshop.

 

Resized Photograph by Richard Potts / Flickr