What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape

by Sohaila Abdulali

We raise our children with such unclear standards that they don’t even have the tools to recognize rape when they see it. We really have a problem if we think it’s easy to confuse sex with rape. Jaclyn has a stark example of this:60 I think often of the two men who intervened when they came upon Brock Turner assaulting an unconscious woman at Stanford—they knew instantly that something was wrong, because she was clearly not participating. Contrast that with Evan Westlake, who in high school witnessed his two friends raping a semiconscious girl at a party in Steubenville, Ohio. When asked why he didn’t intervene, he told the court, “Well, it wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.” I’m sure there are many differences between Westlake and the two men in the Turner case—and these cases are different from the Ansari situation—but the one that stands out to me is that Westlake was raised here in the US. The two men on bicycles in Palo Alto were Swedes, raised in a country that teaches healthy attitudes toward sexuality and gender in school, starting in kindergarten, including lessons on not just biology but healthy relationships, destigmatizing taboos around sex, and, yes, affirmative consent. They knew that a woman who is lying still and not participating in sex is a woman who isn’t consenting. And it prompted them to take action.