RAPE Culture

Today's post is coming from a rather emotional place. Waking up this morning and scrolling through the daily news highlights just to catch a glimpse of the activities around me and I was greeted by one of the most disturbing news headline " 8-month-old girl raped by 28-year-old cousin in Delhi".
This begs the questions are victims of rape still responsible for getting raped? What exactly could an 8-month-old girl have done to entice a 28-year-old man? Did she dress or speak provacatively?
This has got to be one of the most sickening thing I have had the opportunity to read but then it made me start thinking of our world today and how we treat rape. It seems to me that we are so rooted deep in the rape culture a term that is used to describe a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes.
A lot of our societal members have begun to treat rape as an unserious issue trivializing its effects with use of imagery, making rape jokes, and even going ahead to normalize male/ female sexual violence.
This rape culture has promoted

• Victim blaming- Most rape stories I come across, you always find people who want to know what the lady was wearing, what she did to provoke her rapist or why she was at a certain location. All these questions have made a lot of rapist think they also have a right being that "She deserved it", THIS IS BOTH SICKENING AND UNBELIEVABLE. How does one deserve to be violated, how does she deserve to have life as she knows it turned upside down, how does she deserve to continually live with the stigma that one man's uncontrollable urge has brought up upon her?
• Teaching women on how not to get raped- The idea that it is left to you not to get raped instead of emphasizing that rape is unacceptable. 
• Refusing to take rape allegations seriously- It is sad that statistically the amount of rape incidence reported and the amount that are actually investigated are drastically different. I know this has also been influenced by false rape allegations but then why should the true victims suffer for the misdeed of a few others

The presence of this rape culture has increased the amount of victims dying in silence as the society itself has refused to acknowledge the damage of rape. 

The society as a whole needs to revisit and redefine their stance with rape as their nonchalant attitude has caused many their lives, their future, their relationships, their confidence and to some their sanity. We have to stop promoting ideas that male sexuality violence is normal because they are sexual beings and start preaching that rape in any shape or form is unacceptable. We have to stand up and go against victim blaming and slut shaming  and ensure that RAPISTS are blamed for their involvement.  We have to begin to educate our young men that RAPE is wrong and we have to begin to take rape reports as serious as we take terrorist threats. 

Are women the only ones that get raped? No, MEN also get raped but due to the societal views that a man is MACHO most men die in silence and end up being repeated victims.

I charge us all to begin  a new wave of change in our little places of authority, your home, your school, in the midst of friends, or even in the office. Let us all stand as one voice and proclaim that RAPE is an unacceptable barbaric behaviour that NEEDS to STOP.

IDENTITY CRISES

A lot of us including myself have never imagined experiencing identity crises, I always thought my personality was set in stone but boy was I proved sooo wrong this past year. Let us start all over what exactly is identity crisis, according to Webster's New World dictionary

it is a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person's sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society.

My experience this last year was no joke, it was a rather excruciating moment filled with days of realization, days of doubt, days I was ready to take on the world and other days I did not want to get out of bed. It was a whole season of silent tears but a brave face. I became unsure of myself doubting my ability to do the most elementary tasks and all these doubts creeped into every area of my life, my physical, my spiritual, and my emotional. But this period of identity crisis was my fork-road to self-realization , it was a golden opportunity for me to really look in and recognize who I was, my strengths and my weakness.
Identity crisis can sometimes be triggered by a minor change, such as seeing an hero in a different light, loss of family or friend or even an added year. Mine began with a loss, at that moment I saw myself in a different light, I saw things about myself that needed change, I saw things about others that made me question my judgement, I doubted everything that defined me and this went on for a long while.  The one sure mistake I made and would rectify if I could go back in time, is that I kept it all in and did not talk to anyone about what I was going through until one night when I decided to converse with just one person "God".
It was a drafty night and as usual I was unable to sleep, this had happened for about two weeks straight, my bible was right by my bed and I must tell you before this night I had tried several ways to talk to God but nothing felt as right as this moment when I saw my bible and remembered Psalm 139 which had helped me pull through a dark time before.
That night I knew the meaning of groaning because words could not express what I felt, I laid curled up on the floor and groaned to God and for the first time in weeks I slept. I woke up the next morning still gloomy but now I had come to a realization that I had been doing it all wrong. I sat that day and reminded myself of why I had made all my decisions up till now, what had driven me and what had kept me going. This marked the beginning of my road to self-realization, I have not completely figured it all out, I am still processing it but I know that God would in time finalize His work and I would be glad to share it all with you in more depth.
There is no one way in which identity crises develops, It can be linked to doubts about our abilities, religious beliefs, career path, societal role or even political identity. Identity crises shakes the very core of who we have defined ourselves as, but it is left to you to determine what it molds you into.

The only way in which I was able to take control of what my season of crisis would become was to go back to my roots, I went back to the reason I had made certain choices in my life like the choice of religion, my choice of career and even my choice of friends. I went back to God because as the bible passage says "My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth" - Psalm 139:15.

I hope this has encouraged you to know that you are not the only one in doubt of who you are, but you also have to realize that you can turn your moment of crisis into a wave of self-realization.

Happy New Year

YAAASSSS!!!! We made it into 2018
Some of us started off the year by making a list of things we want to begin, things we want to stop and things we want to improve, those are great goals but let us all be sincere how many of us have actually pulled through with this plan. I'm guessing 2 in every 10 people; Well that should be a wake-up call for us all to begin the year by evaluating the past year plans. We can begin by asking questions such as:

•  Why did I not pull through,
• Where my goals SMART,
• Did the company I keep stop me from pulling through remember "show me your friends and I would tell you who you are"

Once you are able to answer all this sincerely, you are ready to tackle your new year plan heads-on. Note: This does not mean you would be able to strike out everything on your plan, there would be setbacks but remember not to let those setbacks define your year


This year, one of my plan is to Blog as much as I can so I can share my experiences with you, make you realize that we can all impart knowledge and we define how our experiences in life shapes us.
Finally, I am grateful for you all and thank you for being so patient with me and constantly reading my write-ups. Cheers to a wonderful year 2018

"We make a living by what we get,

But we make a life by what we give" 

-Winston Churchill