Sexual Violence On College Campuses

780 Words2 Pages

The World Health Organization defines sexual violence as:
“…any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic or other wise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work (WHO, 2001).”
From this definition it is evident that sexual violence encompasses a variety of situations. Sexual violence includes rape, incest, sexual harassment, abuse, unwanted sexual touching, non-consensual sexual actions, and even physical or emotional coercion. The sad reality is that some people might have not even have known a particular situation was sexual violence, which makes this …show more content…

This topic is later discussed in this paper. Sexual violence is a huge topic in today’s society and is far too common. Sadly, this has not been something new in our society. Since 1998, about 17.7 million women have been a victim of sexual violence (Vagianos, 2017). We see it every single day in a variety of forms such as in movies, in books, in our weekly magazine, and on our CNN updates. About every 98 seconds, someone in the United Sates is a victim of sexual violence (Vagianos, 2017). This means that every day it is estimated that about 570 people are victims of sexual violence (Vagianos, 2017). However, sexual violence has become an alarming subject and is affecting students on college campuses in the United States, which is the scope of this paper. Recent statistics have shown that around one in every five women and one in every sixteen men will be a victim of sexual violence by the time they graduate with their …show more content…

This is largely due to the fact college campuses are infamous for experimental phases of students. Many students find themselves drinking and experimenting with various forms of drugs during this time in their lives. Many students also report participating in consuming alcoholic beverages because it helps them to be “social,” helps them meet new people, and even gives students “liquid courage” (Brown, 2014). This binge-drinking trend in students ultimately leads to further problems, and one of the major problems being sexual violence. Sexual violence has resulted in coining alcohol to be the “date rape” drug (Brown, 2014). Heavy drinking is now known as the number one predator in sexual violence situations and is the result of many of these horrifying events. Many students have reported to have lost awareness in certain situations involving drinking and not fully recalling what happened to them until the morning after (Brown, 2014). Unfortunately, less than five percent of sexual violence cases were reported to campus law enforcements (Kingkade, 2014). Many college students have voiced that the reason behind the underreporting of this violence is due to embarrassment, self blame, lack of knowledge of the situation, and fear of the justice system (Wong, 2016). This brings in the importance for a public health

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