String of Sexual Assault Cases May Lead to Tipping Point - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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While protests of the so-called rape culture on college campuses have surfaced before — Take Back the Night marches are decades old — the sudden convergence of exposure and outrage over these acts of sexual violence suggests a tolerance tipping point in American culture for a problem that institutions and victims alike have long hidden from view.
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“I think we are at a critical moment,” said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military justice at Yale Law School. “The military is not on an island all to itself, and the debate in the country is over what is the medicine we need to take. The fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our society treats women is a proposition on which there is now general agreement.”
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“As women expect more equality,” said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who banned some fraternity functions after two separate assault cases, “the prevalence of this archaic behavior becomes increasingly intolerable. You now find flash points where you can protest against that behavior on college campuses and in the military, and there will be others where women and others can get attention for their claims.”
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What has changed are the willingness of women to come forward in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past and, as a result, the pressure on institutions to respond to issues that were once allowed to fester just out of sight.
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in the case of all violence, there are matters ingrained in the culture that experts on sexual violence say go far beyond the institutions now under fire.
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“The fix that I’d like to see,” said Erin Buzuvis, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Western New England University School of Law, “and one that is relevant whether we are talking about Cosby or the military or UVA. is to cultivate as individuals and society intolerance to the ways violence against women is normalized in the media, through sports, on TV and in movies, in video games, in advertising and online.”
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“What you’re seeing with Cosby and college campuses and the military is that victims are gaining strength by seeing the courage of other victims,” she said. “I have seen this incredible increase in the number of people who have come out and are saying, ‘I want people to know that this happened to me.’ ”