Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland

by Nancy Schwartzman

the Department of Justice estimates that one in six women are the victims of attempted or completed rape annually, and we know that those numbers are higher in actuality, as rape is a vastly underreported crime. The risk for young women ages eighteen to twenty-four is three times higher than the average population.

This was a public demonstration of rape culture: the minimizing and normalizing of sexual violence and the cognitive dissonance around the public nature of social media.

This phenomenon has repeated itself over and over again, at every level of football, as coaches and institutions like universities, the NCAA, and the NFL prioritize wins and star players over legal action to protect women from sexual violence. In fact, for example, spanning from 2011 to 2015 at Baylor University, fifty-two accounts of rape by members of the football team were recorded and suppressed, many committed by known perpetrators who transferred to the school to play.

“To be a perfect victim of sexual assault, human trafficking or intimate partner violence, you cannot also struggle with addiction, poverty or mental illness. To be a perfect victim, you cannot accept a drink, engage in commercial sex or walk alone at night. You cannot wear tight clothes or have a criminal record. You cannot be human.”

“The inability to offer a neatly packaged and easily digestible solution does not preclude offering critique or analysis of our current system. We live in a society that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability.”