Stop assuming victims are lying

Unless you live under a rock you have probably heard a lot about Title IX and sexual assault on campus recently. Sexual assault is bad and this situation sucks. Obviously, right?

Well, apparently it’s not obvious. All over campus I’ve heard all sorts of opinions about sexual assault on campus. People are allowed to have their own opinions. I’m not mad about people having their own thoughts. I appreciate people who are able to have a conversation without just repeating what someone else said to them. 

I just didn’t know there were so many ways to view sexual assault other than it’s bad and it shouldn’t happen. 

Boy was I naive. 

I’ve heard people saying the story printed in The Eagle was wrong. Man, I wish I could just brush stuff off like that and assume it was wrong. The man in the story was literally convicted, and people are saying that he didn’t do anything. I think being convicted says quite the opposite. But that’s just me, what do I know. (Besides the dictionary meaning of convicted.) 

Then I’ve heard opinions that basically say well maybe they were lying let’s not jump to conclusions. Which is fair. I don’t think jumping to conclusions is a good idea and it can be very damaging. 

So, let’s look at what the statistics tell us. The percent of rape accusations that are false are two to eight percent, which is actually the same percentage for other felonies according to ourresilience.org. Then of course there’s this horrifying fact: in victims age 12 and older there is about 293,066 rapes or sexual assaults every year in the U.S. alone according to ourresilience.org. That means that about every 107 seconds a sexual assault occurs. 

Does it seem so crazy to assume the victim is telling the truth now?

Lying does happen, and it sucks but I don’t know why anyone would choose not to err on the side of caution. It sucks to admit that people are bad and that scary things happen, I get that. But these things do happen. And choosing not to believe people that have been hurt because you want to believe people don’t do that is not helping anyone. 

It is time to wake up and realize that not everyone is good. Sometimes you’ll meet someone who is nice to you or has good grades and they still turn out to be an awful person to someone else. A letter grade does not make a good person and a smile doesn’t make them a saint. 

Anyone can hurt anyone. 

I know that’s scary but so is being sexually assaulted and reporting it when you know they have a good chance of getting away with it. Stop ignoring or completely invalidating victims’ experiences because you don’t want to jump to conclusions. 

 If you’ve gotten to the end of this article and you’re saying she didn’t say anything about men’s sexual assault I encourage you to look back at my statistics. None of them say women. But I wonder why when we think of sexual assault we think of women?