“One in four girls will experience sexual abuse by the time she is sixteen, and 48 percent of all rapes involve a young woman under the age of eighteen. It’s not surprising then, that in a society where sexual abuse of young women is rampant, many women never share their stories..”
–Patti Feuereisen, Invisible Girls: The
Truth About Sexual Abuse—A Book for
Teen Girls, Young Women, and Everyone Who Cares About Them (2005).
Rape culture is the belief that rape is largely tolerated and that rapists get away with their crime because it is implicitly accepted by society. The fact that the judicial system is failing women is not an indication that rape is okay. How often is justice served to murderers or to other criminals in general?
Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school. Ideally, information on sexual abuse should be integrated into a general curriculum of sex education. In those communities where the experiment has been tried, it has been shown conclusively that children can learn what they most need to know about sexual abuse, without becoming unduly frightened or developing generally negative sexual attitudes.