"Warning: It's that time again! Time for another rape poem."
- Nov 5, 2017
- 2 min read
"Rape Poem To End All Rape Poems" by Rutgers University
Remember that rape poem I posted a few weeks ago?
I bet you're getting now that this title isn't just, because I took it out of the badass slam poem.
It's just frustrating that some people think 'Christ, here's another poem/play that's about rape. What's their deal anyway?'
The deal is that we live in a world were a convicted rapist get six months of prison time, because the presiding judge, Aaron Persky, thought, "A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him."
The deal are these statistics:
"Every 98 seconds an American is sexually assualted."
"11.2% of all students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students)."
"Among undergraduate students, 23.1% of females and 5.4% of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation."
Okay, background time.
A few weeks ago one of my high school friends reached out to our friend group.
She wanted our help in reporting two twitter accounts that were victim-blaming and shaming a rape victim in an ongoing investigation.
So I took to twitter and I reported one of the accounts and I reached out to the other.
It was a young woman about my age who was victim shaming her fellow Panhellenic sister.
How? How can you as a woman? Let alone someone who joined a "sisterhood" turn against one of your own?
As a fellow member of Greek Life I just don't get it.
Even, though she may not have acknowledge my tweets others did.
Including the poet FreeQuency whom I featured in the tweet and, before on this blog.
It felt great knowing that others didn't agree with her, but then there were those who did.
That's something I'm having a hard time forgetting.
Weeks have passed and it still eats at me.
I'm not trying to scare y'all, but maybe we should be, or at least cautious to the world we live in.
It's a shame that we need poems or plays just to get people's attention.
But, when we have women and men using their platforms and being a voice we should appreciate them not berate them.
It's why I have the utmost respect for poets, especially slam poets.
They use their talents to voice the injustices in this world.
Of course, I love this poem written by students at Rutgers University, but I don't think it'll be the Rape Poem to End All Rape Poems.
I wish it was though.
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