Disclaimer: This is a complex post about a complex issue and if you know in your heart that you are not capable of discussing the intricate grayness that exists even with seemingly black-and-white issues, I urge you to skip reading this and go back to Tumblr, Instagram, or whichever social media you prefer using as an echo-chamber group wank. Also, none of the questions asked in this post are rhetorical. I'm asking because I don't know and if someone is an authority or just naturally wise with a reasoned answer, I'm sincerely interested.
Huge fan of Katya and I'm not criticizing her even a tiny bit when I ask this, but it is something I've been thinking about with the immense number of people who have brought up past sexual assaults and/or moments of sexual inappropriateness via social media in the last few months.
What is the value of awareness of this issue? Are there people who don't know that sexual assault is wrong and that victims should report crimes and not blame themselves?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I grew up with school counselors telling us at least once/year about sexual assault with increasing sophistication about what that means and with media that talks about it constantly - while treating sex offenders like they are all John Wayne Gacy even though there is a whole spectrum of behavior by people sharing that label that would never rape or murder children. . . but the media's witch-hunt (for ratings!) of sex offenders is a different subject; my point is that with the appropriate safety instruction received in school and the inappropriate fear-mongering from the news, I find it difficult to imagine anyone is unaware that sexual assault is terrible.
What is important is stopping sexual assault and, for what it is worth, sexual crime rates (along with all other violent crime) has dropped rapidly since the early 90s. The correlation is believed to be due to legalized abortion. If we really want to see a reduction in this and other types of crime, the most important things we need to look at are better foster care/adoption programs, reducing poverty, electing officials who do not pass laws that make it difficult to have an abortion, educating young people about sexual responsibility (using condoms and other pregnancy prevention), and continuing the work of older gays to make being homosexual not something that people choose to hide and be ashamed about.
Not that talking about it on social media to further raise awareness or to share a private struggle with the world is necessarily a bad thing; however, there seems to be an emotional cost to this and if the payoff is simply raising awareness, is it a price worth paying?