A Letter to My Readers

Dear Reader,

Thank you for supporting this platform. We appreciate you. As a current high school senior on the cusp of leaving home, the topic of sexual violence has come up during conservations with my family as I am learning about what it means to be an adult living on my own and leaving the safe confines of my high school community and a relatively sheltered adolescence. I have always wanted to know how I and my peers alike might protect ourselves from sexual assault crimes. This inquiry has led me to set up a fundraiser with RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) aiming to raise money towards helping victims of rape. However, I want to do more. Thus, I have decided to set up this platform where I might speak to people like you on the issue of sexual violence, what constitutes “consent,” and how we might protect ourselves (i.e. defense). I hope that through this platform, my readers and I alike can learn more about this important topic and discover ways in which we can end the age of sexual violence and our pedestrian attitude towards handling instances of such heinous violence. We need to see the end of the atavistic cult of "masculinity." There is no such thing as an overactive male libido, much less one that necessitates rape. This mentality is so fundamentally wrong.

Moreover, I want to raise awareness about the lesser known issues surrounding sexual assault. We all know that sexual assault victims most often identify as women. But what about the children, the young girls and boys who suffer from such crimes? What about the men? We need to begin to be more assiduous in our understanding of rape as a universal crime that can be perpetrated by anyone and can happen to everyone.

Finally, while it is paramount that we continue to provide resources for potential victims of rape and aid to survivors of the crime, I want to begin to turn the focus away from victims in favor of the actual perpetrators themselves. We need a complete overhaul of our current attitude towards sexual violence. When we deal with instances of racism and anti-semitism we turn towards the racists and antisemitics not the victims. We need to begin efforts to change the mentality of those who engage in committing this crime. If these efforts prove unsuccessful, we must campaign for our judicial system to come up with ways in which they might prevent those people from causing any more harm.

We need to start making changes. Please join me in my campaign.

Ladina Moor

Feel free to contact me with any of your own thoughts.