Most talks when it comes to the serious issue of rape always seems to fall into one of the following areas.
A) Rape Prevention for Girls. We give girls and ladies all kinds of tips to help them prevent being raped.
B) The aftermath of rape. All kinds of therapists, counsellors, case workers, doctors, and etc,. try to help rape victims cope with being raped and moving on.
C) Self Defense Training. Basically what to do when you are in a situation where you have to protect yourself physically from an attack.
Well A is a good start as we do need to educate girls and ladies of all ages how to prevent an situation from ever happening. C is a good idea because you need to know how to deal with a situation physically if it happens. This part sucks at the same time as no one should ever be put in this situation. B is needed for those that have been victimized. Normally the aftermath is the worse part to deal with. We need to really find a way to reduce and eventually eliminate the need to counsel victims as I hope one day there won’t be anymore victims.
Now that is a pretty bold statement and it may seem completely out of this world. But it is my hope that we humans will stop raping and doing any other sexual crimes. Now most of the time it is men that do most of these crimes but there is women that are guilty as well. But I want to focus on the men here. Actually I want to focus on the young, preteen, and teenage boys. Do we ever really educate them on rape prevention?
What I mean here is that most of the talks about rape always seems to involve one or more parents or other adults talking to young girls about rape and rape prevention. How many boys and men can say that their parents or someone else sat them down and talk to them about these issues? I know some can say yes they were sat down and talked to. Awesome!!! I want more of this. However a huge population of the boys and men were not. This needs to change.
I believe that we owe it to both young men and women to talk to our sons about rape and respecting women as people and not sex objects. Starting from a young age we should be teaching our sons about respecting all living things and then moving on to respecting all people and then having respect for the opposite of sex. As the sons mature a little and start learning about sex education at school and what not we should be giving them the standard sex talk as well as again having respect for women and not treating them as sex objects. We should educate them on rape and why it is so wrong. We should also teach them about rape prevention so they can help prevent future rapes but being on the look out as well.
The talks should be given more than just once as to sink into the character development of the developing minds of our youth. There is a lot of good resources online as well as in physical print form at local libraries, doctor’s offices, hospitals, and etc,. Do your research and develop a plan on how you are going to talk to your sons. I believe if we all took some responsibilities here that there would be less rape and sexual crimes against women.
Master Jonathan Field