By Susan Marks

I love sex --specifically I love consensual sex, and I want you to love it too! Let me start by giving you a little context about why I want you to know that I love consensual sex, and why I want you to love it.  April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.  But before you tune out, and think that this topic is either not applicable to you, or too depressing to think about, I will make you a promise: What follows will be informative (and thus, because it will reflect the truth of sexual assault in our society, it may be depressing), but it will also be a little fun.

First, a bit about sexual assault, for those of you who don’t know much about it.  Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted.  15% of women in the U.S.  have been the victim of rape; an additional 3% have been victims of attempted rape – for a total of 17.7 million women in the U.S.  alone who have been the victim of either a completed or attempted sexual assault.  Approximately 2/3 of these assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, with 38% being a friend or acquaintance. 

Rape remains the least reported of all violent crimes, with 60% of rapes still not being reported.  Men are the least likely to report a sexual assault, though they make up 10% of victims.  Less than 1% of all reported rapes are false reports, which is lower than the rate of false reports for most other crimes.  When rape victims do report, their perpetrators are rarely charged with a crime; if a case does go to court, the victim’s behavior is prodded and probed as if she were the one on trial.  15 out of 16 rapists will never spend a day in jail.  (These statistics all come from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, and can be found at www.rainn.org).

I hope we can all agree that the above statistics are sobering, and even more so if we realize that each of the 17.7 million women, in addition to all of the men, who have been victims of sexual assault – a number that is literally too large for us to conceptualize – is a human being with a story of suffering in one of the worst ways imaginable, and often at the hands of someone they knew and trusted.  Actually, it doesn’t even matter if you can imagine the numbers.  Just imagine one person being a victim of sexual assault – and then imagine that the person is someone you love and cherish.  I know many of us don’t even have to imagine, because with so many victims, most of us have a friend, family member, coworker, classmate, neighbor, or acquaintance who has been violated, or perhaps even ourselves.  Thus, I think we can all agree that sexual assault is unacceptable. 

So how do we end it?  That’s where the “I love Consensual Sex” campaign can make an impact.

The general public often still holds the opinion that rape is only really rape if it is committed by a stranger, in a dark alley, with a weapon such as a gun or a knife, and committed against a victim who is sober and pure, and who fights back.  But many rapes are committed by a partner, friend, or acquaintance; in a home or car; using coercion, threats, or someone’s vulnerability due to intoxication as a weapon.  And many victims are not sober, and have had sex before.  

Also, the general public seems to think that feminists are man-haters, trying to outlaw nearly all sex (especially sex between a man and a woman) because we are prudes and/or lesbians.  But just because those of us in the movement to end violence against women are against rape, and are doing everything we can to end it in our communities, it doesn’t mean that we are against safe and healthy sex with a partner of your choice.