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.