Abstract
The levels of violence experienced by women in the United States are at unacceptably high levels. Generations and generations of women are socialized to be afraid as they walk down streets and in dark parking lots. Women of all ages are aware of their need to be hypervigilant about their safety (Helliwell, 2000). In the United States, by age 17, one in four girls has experienced sexual assault by adults and peers (Finkelhor, Shattuck, Turner, & Hamby, 2014). This does not account for those young women who experienced physical violence alone. In either case, by late adolescence, women are exposed to violence based on their gender that is systematic, robs them of their feeling of safety, and interferes with their full participation in society (World Health Organization [WHO], 2013). We know based on women’s protective behaviors that violence is every woman’s problem and we theoretically believe that violence is every man’s problem. The latter issue, gender violence as every man’s problem is less clear. For instance, after several conversations among undergraduate and graduate students over the last several years about women’s protective behaviors when returning to their cars in dark parking lots, it is most often the case that college-aged men are unaware of the daily threat of violence felt by women. Some feminist theorists describe the social messaging regarding women’s experiences of violence in these way: Women are portrayed as vulnerable, weak, and incapable of protecting themselves from male assaults and that because of this, women must rely on the law enforcement or male family members or friends (Carlson, 2014). Embedded in this are several ironies. First, given the research on gender violence, by the age of 15, violence has already occurred often at the hands of male adults or peers known to the assaulted female teens. Second, that globally, intimate partners are responsible for the deaths of 38% of murdered women (WHO, 2013). In both these cases, the perpetrator of the violence is potentially the same people that the social messages deem as our protectors. Finally, police protection is available inconsistently, given social class and race. In other words, the reports of upper- and middle-class women are more likely to be believed by the police than for poor women and women of color (Miller, 2008).
Our college campuses have visible education campaigns about the sexual violence experienced by college women and men. These campaigns range from messages about what constitutes sexual violence, the ways that we can support friends who have been violated and banners with pictures of college-aged men pledging that they will be conscious of the safety of women. While it is difficult to pinpoint when women begin to become aware of their vulnerability to gender-based violence, it is clear that by the time they are college age, it is too late. Rape awareness promotion is heavily focused on the postviolence experience. Understandable, this is because of a number of myths that college women are exposed to regarding acquaintance and intimate partner violence. However, interventions focused on the postviolence experience beg the question about interventions that target prevention of gender-based violence. If by adolescence, high rates of violence are occurring for young women in the United States then clearly interventions must be two pronged. First, the social structures that make us accept violence against women as a universal experience and truth must be reevaluated (Helliwell, 2000). For gendered violence to be as prevalent and systematic as it is in the United States, we have to investigate our beliefs about the predator or bogyman awaiting the vulnerable women. We have to accept that there are ways that male group behavior and the socialization of men and women in U.S. society supports rampant violence against women (Sanday, 2007). Perhaps it is time to feel angry that the messages we still get is that we should feel unsafe crossing unfamiliar dark streets, don’t drink too much, walk with mace, and feel afraid of being a victim of violence based on our gender.
Second, the targets for interventions that can begin to interrupt the acts of violence against and acceptance of violence on females must begin at an earlier age. These interventions must not be gender neutral such as programs that target bullying but address issues of aggression and the acceptable enactment of masculinity that includes aggression as a form of coercion, exertion of power, and violence against females.
If Messing (2011) is to be believed that “there is a reflexive interplay between the power structure and the majority consensus in society that creates and upholds the definitions of deviance and determines the mechanism by which behavior is controlled” (p. 163); than given the acceptance of gendered violence, we should be wondering why violence against women isn’t deviant enough? Even as we experience rates of violence differently, as women of color, as transgender women, as poor women, middle-class women, and as white women, the violence experienced by one of us, because of the systematic way it is targeted at our gender, is violence experienced by all of us. It is that prevention is too late.