Rape Culture In College

Rape culture in college has come to the center of headlines in the last few years. Particularly, rape has been highlighted at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where a girl was raped, reported it, and then the administration did not conduct an appropriate investigation and at Columbia University, where a female student was raped and when action was not taken, she carried the mattress she was raped on everywhere throughout her senior year. However, at Old Dominion and SUNY Cortland, two separate fraternities displayed spray painted sheets insinuating their ability to acquire new freshman girls on campus. Such acts were condemned by the school as public uproar ensued. Society’s depiction of woman as chiefly being sexual objects, colleges inability …show more content…
One such example is the connection between economic class and the ability to acquire sufficient female contraception. Therefore, poor women in America, prior to the Affordable Healthcare Act, lacked the ability to acquire birth control, ultimately leading to further economic depression (My Faith). With the Act, 99% of teenagers and women aged 15 to 44 have used contraception (My Faith). Women’s access is important for reasons broader than family planning, but also for dealing with “ovarian cyst, painful periods, and endometriosis,” but also it is key in career planning (My Faith). Widespread accessibility and affordability of birth control has given American women a greater economic opportunity. Furthermore, birth control can limit the number of births a mother has which in turn increases here life expectancy because as we saw in the snapshot slides, there is a direct correlation between higher birth rates and increased maternal mortality throughout the world (A Snapshot of Females Status …show more content…
However, more specifically the infanticide is a gendercide of female babies. Why specifically female babies? For much of history, women have been viewed as inferior to men and thus in heavily impoverished areas, girls are viewed as undesirable, dispensable, and second-class citizens. The documentary sites that at birth, often the parents of daughters are heavily encouraged to abandon or eliminate a girl. If parents refuse, others take it upon themselves to murder the child. Societal pressures sex determination test as early as possible as well. A major influence for such societal practices is due to intersectionality. Many of these cultures live in poverty, as depicted in the trailer, and men are often viewed as moneymakers, whereas women are viewed as costing the family money, putting them further into poverty. Therefore, this ideology predetermines a human’s fate prior to birth and perpetuates gender inequalities as there is a lack of opportunity to improve economic and societal standing for women in these impoverished areas. Societal pressures limit women across the world. Author Salma Maoulidi describes how woman struggle to rise above the stereotypes that plague them in Tanzania because of the social and political pressures of their hegemonic society