The college class on avoiding rape. Please move on, nothing to see here.

[ElboRuum]

69. I am willing to accept the idea that I am wrong.

And to take to your first point, you state that "many young men DO NOT think that rape is wrong". However, when you say that they have very misguided ideas about rape and when it is okay, then that indicates to me not so much that they don't think that rape is wrong, but are unaware of what constitutes rape. If this is a challenge to be overcome then I am in full agreement that we should ABSOLUTELY be doing a better job of making people understand that there are no exceptions to the rule that states "If there is no consent, and sex happened, it is rape."

However, I can say that in my time in school, and this was back in the 80s, a very clear definition of what rape is was a part of the general health curriculum. Moreover, such curricula seemed to be prevalent, because as I entered college in the late 80s, you didn't have to explain to men what rape was. However, if this is what kids going into college today are evincing as their "knowledge" of rape, then I think a good case can be made to suggest that modern curricula in this regard are failing quite miserably.

I think I know why it is "frightening". I quote that as such, because I think that's a misconstruation of "insulting", which I think is a better read of the emotion you are encountering. And that's just it. It WOULD be insulting to someone who DID have an actual, effective life skills/drug awareness/sex education program as part of their precollegiate curriculum, something we USED to have in this country before abstinence-ed and chastity pledging started taking the place of it in our schools. Given the demographics of DU, I would expect that most, if not all, men on DU were fortunate enough to have gotten through the educational system of this country before this sort of ass-backwards experimentation with that curricula started happening.

Don't get me wrong, if this truly IS the state of secondary education in this country such that a freshman in college can't supply a definition of rape commensurate with its legal gravity and understanding that it is utterly reprehensible, then YES you are correct that this education is precisely necessary.

However, I do think that such a thing might be beyond the resource capabilities of freshmen orientation, since these are generally volunteer programs handled by upperclassmen, unless that has also changed since I was in school. Might need to be a full semester course, or at least a mandatory seminar.

I appreciate your response greatly.