By Roisin Cowan-Kuist
Content Warning: This story discusses sexual violence.
When it comes to sexual violence, the topic is all too often framed as a women’s issue, said Keith Edwards, Western’s guest speaker at the “Ending Rape” event on Thursday, Feb. 22.
Edwards is a scholar who studies sexual violence and college men's issues. He recently co-chaired College Student Educators Internationals' Presidential Task Force on Sexual Violence Prevention in Higher Education, according to Western Today.
Edwards said viewing sexual harassment, assault and rape as issues that only affect women is a cultural narrative that must be challenged.
“If we know men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual violence, we can’t ignore gender,” Edwards said.
Edwards explained that viewing sexual violence through this lens fails to recognize other people who experience sexual violence, such as trans and non-gender conforming people. It also places the burden and blame on the shoulders of survivors, Edwards said.
The event, which was hosted by Western’s Men’s Resiliency Committee and the AS Womxn’s Identity Resource Center, offered audience members an examination of what Edwards referred to as a cultural “miseducation” in sex, particularly for male-identifying people.
“We know that these acts of violence, aggression, power and control are bad,” Edwards said. “And we really want to believe that people who commit sexual violence are deviant in our normal culture. But when we really look closely we see that more often than not they are normal people in our deviant culture.”
Edwards went on to explain that the common “stranger in the bushes” view of who commits rape is only representative of a small percentage of recorded instances of sexual violence.
In seven out of 10 cases of rape, the victim knows the rapist, according to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) and based on Department of Justice statistics. The same report found that on college campuses nationwide, sexual assault is more prevalent than other crimes.
Edwards said lack of education on informed consent, paired with warped cultural views on masculinity, are key forces driving high rates of sexual violence.
Audience member and Whatcom Community College student Dakota Evans explained that many men lack the tools necessary to define what is and isn’t sexual assault.
“We do kind of have a very polarized view of it, saying like ‘Oh this is rape, or this isn’t rape,’” Evans said. “A lot of people don’t really look at the grey, in-between areas.”
But those areas of ambiguity are exactly the places in which normal, healthy sexual interactions can quickly turn into ones of violence, Edwards said.
