SEXUAL VIOLENCE PREVENTION
In 2013, Steubenville, OH, captured the nation’s attention. We were appalled at the details: a high school girl repeatedly and publicly raped by her peers, all captured on video and shared on social media.
But perhaps even more horrifying was the exposure of a culture that, from beginning to end, operated to normalize, incite, sanction, and cover up sexual assault. We watched as video emerged of a teenage boy heartlessly joking about the girl who had been raped.
While many dismissed him as a monster, we instead saw him as a product of a culture that normalizes violent attitudes and language towards women. In the video, he’s not alone. He’s just one part of a group of boys expressing their flawed—and dangerous—understanding of masculinity. At one point, two other boys who are off camera essentially intervene as bystanders. They call out the boy for being cruel…and they’re laughed off and dismissed as though they weren’t even there.
That’s when we realized that to truly change the outcomes for the 1 in 5 women who are raped in the United States, we’ll have to do the hard work of changing the culture that makes it possible.
From the ground up.
Tahir is the founder and director of ReThink, a nonprofit dedicated to working with young men and boys to break down the cultural norms that underpin sexual violence.
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“We will never take sexual violence seriously enough to put a dent in rape culture as long as our interventions only arrive after someone has been accused.”
