Is this real life?

An impassioned message to those planning on being parents. Or just an angry rant from a young woman to the internet.

My mother set up rules for me to follow anytime I step out of the door into the big, wide world.

"Cover yourself! You don't want to draw attention."
"Always have friends and a plan."
"Don't let yourself gain a reputation."

I have made a rule like this for myself as well. I work nights a lot. I like to have my car keys in my hand before I even leave a building (and the people inside it) to go to my car. The thirty seconds to few minutes I spend rifling through my purse in the dark are the same thirty seconds to a minute or so it takes me to become vulnerable to any attack. An attack. At some point, someone with malicious intent will take advantage of my momentary distraction to snatch my purse, molest me sexually, rape me, or take my life. It's never happened before to me, but this is the precaution I take so that it never does.

One in four women in the United States is sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, most before the age of 21. In most cases, it's not by strangers lurking in dark parking lots. It's by friends, family members and acquaintances. People these women have chosen to put their trust in. And, only four percent of these women assaulted or raped will report it to authorities. Most do not think they can be aided or deserve to be aided.

Are you enraged yet? I am.

This week, two young men were convicted for raping a young girl in the small town of Steubenville, Ohio. Trent Mays, one of the boys who has been convicted of raping and photographing the sixteen year old girl, says in his apology, "No pictures should have been sent out, let alone taken." And a witness, a young man who had filmed Mays penetrating the girl's vagina with his fingers deleted the video because the video was wrong.

Please, please be enraged now.

They see wrongness not in the fact that they betrayed a person's trust and raped a woman who was unable to give consent of her body, but in the idea that evidence of the fact was taken and shared, that this ruins their reputation and their careers.

I pity their selfish, naive perspective.

What they should realize - what every man and woman should realize about this situation - is not that the sin will find you out, it's that violating the trust between people is beyond wrong. This girl had willingly been in the company of these boys, and they took advantage of her drunken, vulnerable state. They toyed with her body, bragged about it to their friends, and then denied it to her, her father and the world.

They are not sad or regretful of anything other than the fact that they were caught. They are not sad that they have tortured and traumatized this young woman; they're remorseful that they won't be playing football for the rest of their high school careers. They're sad that they'll be sitting in a jail cell until their twenty-first birthdays.

Do you want to know what I'm sad about? I'm sad that in four or five years when these boys are out of juvenile hall, they'll still get married. They'll still have children, and they will pass along this idea that people have entitlements to other people's bodies.

I'm sad that they are not the only people who will continue to pass this mindset and social structure to other generations. I'm sad that my mother passed this message on to me. In telling me to cover up my body, she has told me that when I step out of my house, my body is no longer mine in the eyes of others. When I show my body to others, it belongs to them. My reputation belongs to those that build it on what they see of me.

How sad is that?

This is my body, my mind, my dreams and hopes and goals. When I become a mother, this is what I want to teach my children: that their bodies belong to them, containing their hopes and dreams and goals. That each person belongs to their body, and that my sons or daughters should not believe they have a right to touch anyone without consent or in violence, except maybe in the protection of their own body.

I want my daughters to feel pride in their own skin, and for my sons to respect the rights of others. I want the idea of penetrating an unwilling partner to be unfathomable to my children. I want the results of this Steubenville incident to change the way we raise our children. I want for us all to make this world a place where we can trust others when we are too drunk to defend ourselves, or momentarily distracted looking for our car keys.

Source: CNN press release
Source: CNN report of mother's statement.
Source: The Women's Center, Inc. fact page
Source: One in Four USA statistics page
Source: Daily Mail UK
Source: NY Times