Imagine a city where men were being raped at random. The victims were young, mostly targeted on the street—followed off buses or stalked on their walk home. Young men had to worry about this often, every day, and the police’s response was to tell them to just stay inside if they’re so scared.
Obviously, it is impossible to know how a situation like this would actually play out. But it is hard to imagine violence against men ever being treated in the same manner as violence against women. If men were the ones being attacked in large numbers, the police would not suggest they all just stay inside. That “solution” would be seen for what it is: absolutely ridiculous.
Men have jobs to work and things to buy and people to see, of course, and they need to be able to get home and back safely in order to accompliush all these tasks. If a madwoman hellbent on getting revenge on all men for her lifelong virginity murdered people and released a feminist manifesto about it, you can bet we would be spoon-fed a discussion about the evils of women’s liberation. If they were deprived of such a basic freedom, to be able to move around the city without fear of attack, men would would immediately scream and shout and protest until this right was returned.
We need them to do the same for us.
Unfortunately, here in Ottawa (and in the rest of the world) it is only women who are victimized in this way, so there is no outrage. The arrest of a man suspected in a string of rape cases earlier this month may let women breathe easy – for a minute.
It does nothing to protect us from the rest of the world. It does nothing to address the fact that, according to a Canadian Federation of Students—Ontario fact sheet on sexual violence, 60 per cent of college-aged males say they would sexually assault someone if they knew they would not get caught.
While we may be safer from one stranger on the street, we are still in danger of our friends, relatives, acquaintances, boyfriends and dates, who statistically are much more likely to assault us than any stranger is. And, let me repeat that, apparently a majority of them see no problem with rape other than getting caught.
So, a lasting solution to this disgusting problem will depend on men. It has to. Men not only commit the vast majority of violent crimes, they also make up most of our police force and legislature that are supposed to keep us safe.
To call rape a women’s issue and leave it to female feminists to solve is not just simply dismissive, it is straight up blind. Sexual assault is not a boogey man hiding under the bed. It is an attitude. It lives in our heads. It is an entitlement to sex and a fundamental lack of empathy for women.
It is why half of the women in this country will be physically or sexually assaulted in their adult lifetime, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation. It is why a woman in this city can not even win a student election without being threatened with rape by her colleagues, as the distinguished gentlemen at the University of Ottawa made clear earlier this year.
We need men who will completely re-evaluate what they have been taught about sex and gender. We need men who will listen to the women in their lives and take their safety as seriously as they take their own.
Our city depends on it.
