Guest Column: Wet streets cause rape

Fifteen years ago this week, nine women at this university shocked the nation with an art project: a series of 6-foot billboards placed around the campus with a list of all "identifiably male names" in the student directory under the heading "Potential Rapists." The billboards were put together for Art Attack by the Women's Coalition for Change.

What have we learned since 1993? Not much, apparently.

Last month, the University Health Center flooded the campus with signs and paid advertisements to promote its staggeringly insensitive Men's Anti-Violence Project.

The ad campaign exhorts the male student body to "Man up. Get consent." A reasonable person might say that there is, semantically speaking, nothing wrong with the statement and ask, "What's wrong with telling someone not to do a bad thing?" It's the same reason you don't tell your doctor not to give you a flu shot using an AIDS-infected needle, because to question whether a person is acting ethically is to insult their integrity. This statement reflects a belief on behalf of the project's staff that all men have the desire and capability to rape.

The health center's website says the idea that "rape is committed by … maniacs" is a myth and that "the majority of rapes are committed by 'normal' friends or acquaintances." This is a reasonable and ultimately necessary message - women need to know that sexual predators are in every social group and blend in seamlessly with the rest of society, and that in order to protect themselves, they have to withhold their trust from those who haven't earned it.

But let me phrase it more accurately: The majority of rapes are committed by friends or acquaintances who seem normal. The health center supports the statement that paints average men as predators-in-waiting, while my view portrays rapists as predators who are adept at acting completely normal. This difference betrays a failure on the part of health center staff to acknowledge men as thinking, feeling human beings.

Furthermore, their message honestly claims to prevent gender violence by means of social engineering, derived from the philosophies of "gender violence prevention experts" such as Jackson Katz and Byron Hurt. The crux of the Men's Anti-Violence Project revolves around a series of lectures and workshops aimed at convincing men that rape is bad. These forums deal with many worthwhile topics, such as teaching men how to support female friends who have been raped or are in abusive relationships, but the arrogance of the organizers is astounding if they honestly think telling a group of average men who voluntarily attend to "stop raping people" is going to solve anything. In the name of political correctness, they replaced a strategy that works - providing women with skills and tools to protect themselves from predators, with one that doesn't - trying to stop sexual assault through passive resistance.

The dangerous thing here is that the assumption that people's core values can be influenced by fleeting media images works the other way around. The same people who think rapists can be persuaded not to rape by a media campaign believe wholeheartedly that normal men can likewise be persuaded to rape by violent movies, video games and rap music videos.

This is a "wet streets cause rain" scenario - the ridiculous idea that rape is not caused by the sociopathic tendencies of individual men, but because men as a whole watch too many Michael Bay films. It's all too easy to blame free speech for our problems and ignore the larger social issues that cause them.

Not only is the underlying philosophy behind the project fundamentally flawed, it does not prevent rape and is a flagrant waste of money. In the past month, the project purchased five full-page ads in The Diamondback, spending more than $8,000. Even if you agree with the premise of the campaign, isn't there a more productive use of that money? Maybe a women's self-defense course, a campus-wide distribution of date-rape drug test kits or, at the very least, an educational campaign about gender violence directed to men that doesn't treat them like monsters.

Sexual assault is a very serious issue and, while it is clear that both the Men's Anti-Violence Project and the Women's Coalition for Change had the best of intentions to raise awareness and educate students, both of them trivialize it when they frame it as a war between the sexes. I have immense respect for what Byron Hurt and Jackson Katz are trying to do, but somewhere a line was crossed, and we're all worse off because of it.

A.J. Cooke is a junior English major. He can be reached at cookie@umd.edu.