Rape

The new Arkansas Bill H.B. 1566 requires women to get permission from the biological father before getting an abortion. This includes incidents of rape. Here's why this is all kinds of dangerous.

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

I rarely have dreams about being raped anymore, that is until I announced on Facebook that I was going to India. Immediately, my inbox and my phone filled with stories about rape in India.

This means that if you are sexually assaulted in California after this law takes effect in January 2017, you have all the time you need to gather your strength to press charges.

It took me a long time to understand consent. I knew that forcing sex on someone was rape. I knew that one in five women would be raped in their lifetime. I knew that the majority of rape victims knew their attacker. But beyond that, my understanding got cloudy.

My story isn’t meant to hold a mirror to society and say, “You, too, can be strong like me.” It’s meant to hold a mirror to society and say, “You, too, are complicit in rape culture. Let’s work on that.”

For more than 20 years, I believed I was a slut. A shameful, vile, one-time slut, but a slut all the same. It was you, Mr White Canterbury shorts, that led me to believe this. But, since reading the letter from Brock Turner’s victim, I realized, what you did, Mr White Canterbury Shorts, was in fact rape.

Much has already been said about the way the Stanford swimmer's privilege has insulated him from consequence, about the ever-pervasive victim blaming in public discourse, and about the inadequacy of the criminal justice system. But in so many of these conversations, in our rage against the rape culture machine, we forget the survivors — the most important people in the fight against sexual violence.