voices
14 the georgetown voice
october 24, 2013
Sexual assault a cultural problem, not a self-help issue by Julia Lloyd George The first time I got drunk, I was 17 and at my cousin’s house in London. I’d had alcohol before, but never enough to feel that hazy lightness I’d heard so much about. I woke up the next morning with my first hangover. The party the night before felt like some distant and glamorous dream. I wouldn’t be drunk again until college, which fostered a culture entirely foreign to one in which I was just drinking sangria with German exchange students. I noticed a fierceness in the way that people approached alcohol, like drinking was some kind of extreme sport. I started getting used to hearing people tell battle stories about their weekends, bashfully recounting how wasted they’d been and how they’d been pushed to the point of throwing up when these seemed to secretly be points of pride. On a couple of occasions, I became that person myself.
But, it wasn’t until the summer after my freshman year that my relationship with alcohol got out of hand. I entirely lost control and ended up getting blackout drunk with a group of strangers at a music festival. When I found myself in an ambulance later, I was told that my blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit and that I’d been found wandering around naked. I will never know what happened that night, but I felt vulnerable and scared in a way that I had never been before. I felt dirty, powerless, and small. I swore to myself I would never get into that situation again. So far, I’ve been successful, though there have been a few low points when I got close. The decision to drink alcohol will always be personal, a consideration of the risks in comparison to the reward: that uninhibited feeling of invincibility, deceptive as it is. I alone am responsible for the extremes of drunkenness I have reached. I alone can monitor myself. But that does
not in any way make me culpable for what someone did to me while I was drunk. Laying the burden of responsibility at the door of a sexual assault victim not only heightens psychological damage in the aftermath, but also shifts our focus to the wrong area. Educating people about alcohol and encouraging responsible drinking as prevention for situations of sexual assault are only common sense, since incapacitated people make the most natural targets. I have no issue with being told to drink responsibly, but what I do resent is the implication that my drinking habits constitute the only variable. The attitude that the behavior of sexual attackers is somehow a constant unable to be budged only serves to substantiate cultural inertia and reinforce the stigma of being a sexual assault victim. Every rape case in the national spotlight seems to involve a girl who drank too much and the boys who took advantage of her condition. Those circumstances, sadly though,
are hardly newsworthy. The reason we hear about cases like that of Daisy Coleman or the girl in Steubenville, Ohio, lies in the ways in which those communities foster a rape culture that encourages victim ostracism and perpetrator protection. The kind of society that attacks a rape victim over social networking and forces her family to leave town constitutes a problem far greater than any alcohol education program can possibly prevent. This is a culture in which rape is a non-issue, while a girl having non-consensual sex and making a fuss about it is a crime worthy of censure. On a smaller level, Daisy Coleman’s agreement to have a drink five shots tall might have been prevented by the knowledge of what it would do to her, but women also tend to be people pleasers. Saying no might seem uncool or antisocial. Moreover, breaking rules is fun and drinking is glamorous. I went through AlcoholEdu along with the rest of my class-
mates, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still sometimes overestimate my capabilities. Telling only one gender to moderate drinking is a short-sighted tactic because it overlooks the reality of social situations and the ways in which alcohol-related sexual assault also affects men, both as victims and attackers with a dim memory of the night before. As long as a culture in which heavy drinking is promoted and rape does not carry severe consequences persists, the two will go hand in hand. Tackling both elements of a toxic environment requires major systemic change that cannot possibly happen overnight, but altering attitudes tends to be both the most difficult and most fundamental solution. Unfortunately, there is no class for that.
Julia Lloyd George is a junior in the College. She’s also annoyed there aren’t classes for paper football and Dungeons & Dragons.
Nobel Peace Prize obsolete and based on media attention by Ian Philbrick Early in the morning on Friday, Oct. 11, media outlets lit up with the announcement that the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Founded in 1997 and based in The Hague, the OPCW is organizing intergovernmental efforts to inspect chemical weapons sites of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Most commentators were rooting for 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who was the prospective front-runner among this year’s 259 nominees. Her loss shows that winning the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t
mean that much—and that’s something that should bother us. While the choice of OPCW is unlikely to provoke the same controversy that met Yassir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Perez in 1994 and President Obama in 2009, this year’s choice is somewhat ironic. Although the Nobel Committee denied that Assad’s violations of international law influenced their decision to award the prize to a chemical weapons watchdog organization, the timing is difficult to ignore. Still, Dashiell Bennett from The Atlantic Wire brought up the point that what could be more warranted than a robust condemnation of such be-
LEILA LEBRETON
MSBro receives Nobel Peace Prize for safely running the largest beer pong competition.
havior in “the first year in decades that chemical weapons were deployed in battle on a large scale”? The problem with a Peace Prize attuned to current events and awarded on that basis isn’t necessarily that it’s premature or undeserved, but that it focuses too much attention on newspaper headlines. Media have focused the world exhaustively upon every step of the political tango danced by President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin around an agreement, every dissembling denial of wrongdoing by Assad, and every opinion rendered by punditry and politicians preceding the UN resolution that provided the OPCW’s its mandate. What hope is there for issues that lie outside the limelight? Bringing awareness to injustice shouldn’t be reduced to pageantry when the issue most in the news gets the win. The Prize is and should be a forum on humanitarian issues affecting the international community—but the humanitarian crises needing the most attention are the ones about which we know least. Far more than not being able to satisfy everyone (an impossibility), the trouble with the awarding of the Peace Prize this year—the trouble with awarding it any year—is that public opinion matters little in the
decision. Which did we, the world, need more? An affirmation that the use of chemical weapons against a civilian population represents a heinous rejection of human norms, which is undoubtedly true; or, proof that individuals can, through their courage and persistence, combat oppression and promote women’s educational rights, ideals in which we ourselves have a daily stake? Ultimately, not only do individuals, activist groups, and NGOs make a difference in humanitarian crises, but they also impact the greater attention of humankind. The Peace Prize has an obligation to better facilitate this process. The funding and public attention that come not just with winning but with being nominated are the Prize’s perennial value. The positive attention brought to the individuals and organizations laboring to address injustices that persist without significant public awareness is immeasurably redeeming in light of the demonstrable failings of the prize itself. Malala, for one, appears to be capitalizing on her brush with the Prize the right way. Not only has she demurred when asked if she deserved to win, but she has harnessed the publicity generated by the prize to launch the Malala Fund, raising money
and awareness for her cause. She is living out her own maxim, expressed in an interview for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, that “we don’t realize the importance of anything until it is snatched from our hands.” Other nominees, who include Congolese gynecologist and sexual assault victim activist Dr. Denis Mukwege, the first-ever female attorney general of Guatemala Dr. Claudia Paz y Paz, and three female Russian human rights activists, should follow her example. The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 94 times, to 100 individuals and 25 organizations. It is individuals, far more than organizations alone, who have the faces, stories, and voices that inspire others to action. In her Daily Show interview, Yousafzai speaks with all the idealistic conviction of a 16-year-old, yes—but also with a conviction that resonates beyond any award and beyond the easy immediacy of the headlines. As Alfred Nobel himself stated, “I would like to help dreamers.” The Nobel Committee would do well to take note.
Ian Philbrick is a freshman in the College. Honestly, he just hates everything about news media. Awkward.