By Hiba Ali
Staff Writer
Since April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, CSUB has showed that we did not forget the innocent children who have been abused or sexually harassed by presenting a local movie called Trade of Innocents at the Student Union.
The Student Union presented Trade of Innocents movie for all students and staff on April 16, 2014.
The United Nations Children’s Fund has estimated that Human Trafficking is now the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. As many as 1.2 million children are trafficked each year. Like any other criminal act, human trafficking is an underground activity that is prohibited all around the world, as it should be. Human trafficking affects numerous amounts of parents; women, men, and children and that should be stopped.
The movie shows children, starting with the age of six and up, which were sold to a guy and make them prostitutes for money. The movie basically showed that children could not choose their life. Some of the young girls were sold, and others were taking from their parents.
Emily Poole, the Assisting Director of Campus Programing, decided to show this movie is, “To provide opportunities to students to learn about what sexual assault is, the resource on campus that we have.”
“The students and committee, made of a faculty staff and students, wanted to include an anti-human-trafficking component with the sexual assault month awareness” Poole added.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proved that, “In the United States, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men have been raped in their lifetime and nearly 1 in 2 women and 1 in 5 men have experienced other forms of sexual violence at some point in their lives.”
The CDC is trying hard to stop this horrifying activity and helping the people who have gone through it.
Most of the students I have interviewed agree that we should teach kids from the age of 8-9 about sexual assault to educate them and inform them about it, because they think it is going to aware them and protect them; teaching them would make them safer. They think that we should talk about it more at school and at home.
“Spread the word out, not only to college students, but also younger students; especially kids these days with social media and stuff” agrees Ghassan Bin Rasheed Al-Olaimi, a 24-year-old CSUB student.
Haidi, a CSUB student, says, “It is important to talk about it with our kids, but it is not an easy topic though.” Haidi also thinks that it may not prevent the sexual assault to happen when we talk with our kids, but to prepare and protect them from happening.
The next Brown Bag Discussion will have sexual abuse survivors, local women, who will talk and share their story of being survivors after being human trafficking victims. The discussion will be held on Thursday, April 24th, 2014, from 12 p.m to1 p.m. at the Stockdale room (inside the café.)
“So, if you educate them now, they will be able to watch out for those out there.” –Al-Olaimi said.
Egalitarian • Apr 29, 2014 at 7:01 am
The “1 in 71 men have been raped” stat from the CDC survey doesn’t tell the whole story. It defines “rape” as the attacker penetrating the victim, which excludes women who use their vagina to rape a man (rape by envelopment) which is counted as “made to penetrate”. The very same survey says “1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else,” which is far more than 1 in 71. Also, the study says that 79.2% of male victims of “made to penetrate” reported only female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman.
The above, lifetime stats do show a lower percentage of male victims (up to 1.4% rape by penetration + 4.8% made to penetrate = 6.2%) than female victims (18.3%) although it is far more than the 1 in 71 you stated. However, if you look at the report’s stats for the past 12 months, just as many number of men were “forced to penetrate” as women were raped, meaning that if you properly include “made to penetrate” in the definition of rape, men were raped as often as women.
Hiba Ali • Apr 30, 2014 at 10:45 pm
If I’m going to write about sexual assault again and did mention rape, I will definitely do mention what you just said. but I wanted to correct you that men were actually sexually assaulted or raped ALMOST as often as women, and i have looked it up and all the websites i have looked through agreed with this statistic. Thank you for your comment.