Locker Room Banter is Rape Culture

Originally published via Medium by Sheila Katz, the Vice President of Social Entrepreneurship at Hillel International and a board member of the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse:

The most recent Presidential debate was a missed opportunity. The opening question about sexual assault elicited Donald Trump’s excuse that his recent remarks about groping women without consent were just “locker room banter.” Sadly, while both candidates were standing on Washington University in St. Louis’ campus, neither chose to bring awareness to the one in five women and one in 16 men on campuses around the country who graduate each year as survivors of sexual assault. Sexual assault deserved greater respect and time in the debate.

“Locker room banter” isn’t innocent; it is rape culture, and we have a responsibility to put an end to it. In a recent study on male college athletes, more than half of male sports players admitted to having “sexually coerced” a woman. Several of the actions listed in the survey, such as the use of threats or physical violence to make their partner have sex, meet some states’ legal definition of rape. Respondents also believed several rape myths, such as that victims who were drunk are partly responsible for their sexual assault and that it isn’t rape if a woman doesn’t fight back.

At this point in the school year, students on college campuses are in the “red zone” — the time period between arriving for fall semester and Thanksgiving, when the majority of sexual assaults occur. Elected officials, students, faculty, and other campus professionals should all be asking ourselves how we can prevent sexual assault from staying the norm.

During a decade of working with college students, I have been a confidant of hundreds of survivors of campus sexual assault. Survivor-led organizations are paving the way toward important legislative change and providing support to fellow survivors. Many high schools are beginning sexual consent education before students enter college. But there is more we can do collectively to change the campus environment and end rape culture.

Here are four steps we can take right now:

1) Believe survivors. Before we can prevent and eliminate the epidemic of sexual assault, we must first take survivors’ stories seriously. It starts with three simple words: “I believe you.”

The impact of assault takes a profound toll on survivors, who often experience long-term physical and mental health effects. One-third of women who survive sexual assault contemplate suicide. This is a national health epidemic.

When students come forward to say they have been assaulted, we must not question them, we must believe them. This simple act can be transformative to their wellbeing. If we silence and shame survivors, we perpetuate common myths, which allows the cycle of violence to continue.

2) Know the facts. We must dispense with the idea that rapists lurk in the bushes and only attack in the dead of night as a helpless victim walks home alone. The truth is that most incidents of sexual assault on campus are committed by individuals familiar to their victims, sometimes an acquaintance met at a party, sometimes a trusted friend.

3) Call out rape culture. During the debate, Anderson Cooper stood up for survivors when he corrected Donald Trump’s locker room banter comment, naming his description of groping women without consent as sexual assault. Like Cooper, we must respond when we hear friends, community members, or even people in locker rooms making statements that perpetuate rape culture — whether it’s about convincing someone to be sexual with them, getting someone drunk, or even abusing one’s power to touch people without their consent. Since the debate, several athletes shared that they don’t condone or participate in locker room banter. This helps. When we don’t stand up to the language of rape culture around us, we implicitly condone it.

4) Act. Bystanders must become upstanders and intervene when others are in danger. Collecting car keys from those drinking at a party doesn’t just protect that individual, but everybody on the road. We need to extend that same vigilance to people who might be in danger of sexual assault. Whether potential victims can’t consent because they are inebriated or don’t consent but are ignored, we have a moral duty to intervene. If someone is taking another person to a room, and that person is in a state in which consent cannot be given, we have a responsibility to intervene. Sex without consent is rape. Intervening protects our friends, loved ones, and yes, even complete strangers, while upholding the values of our campus communities.

At Hillel International, we engage with hundreds of thousands of college students at more than 500 campuses across the country every year, and we see actively responding to rape on campus and supporting survivors as part of our mission. We are an outspoken partner in the White House’s It’s On Us initiative promoting bystander intervention as a means to reduce the unacceptable prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses.

As Jewish tradition tells us, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” As individuals, we may not have all the tools to eliminate the scourge of sexual assault on campus, but as a community, we have the responsibility to educate ourselves and others in order to increase campus safety, and to support survivors when they share their stories.

The difficult and lengthy process of changing cultural norms will require engagement and investment from all corners of campus communities, including athletic departments, Greek life, religious organizations, campus health centers, faculty and administrators. Many have already stepped up to join the challenge, but we need the entire campus network engaged. We invite all organizations with a presence on college campuses to join us in this critical work.

We are at a rare moment, when the entire country is fixated on who we want to be. Candidates are sharing their solutions to getting us there. Now is our opportunity to say definitively that words matter, that “locker room talk” that condones or perpetuates rape culture is unacceptable, and that we will not stand idly by when we hear language that threatens or demeans anyone.