Richmond High Rape Response

In response to the Richmond High School rape article, I found it to be shocking that people would actually just stand around a situation like that and not try to do anything to help. Sure, it might be unsafe to try to intervene physically, but more people could have at least shown her the respect not to gawk at the horrible scene that was occuring. As stated in the article, I believe that a lot of this lack of emotion or caring about women stems from the way that women are portrayed in the media today. If all we see are images of women wearing revealing clothes and engaging in promiscuous behavior, it becomes hard to separate fiction from reality. Soem people might even come to believe that real-life girls and women actually enjoy being raped and abused. However, this indoctrination still doesn't give the onlookers any excuse for allowing such a callous rape to continue. In this case, when you really think about it, the bystanders are almost as much to blame for the rape as the rapists themselves. By not doing anything to stop it and even taking part in filming it and egging it on, they ended up encouraging it to continue.

On a larger scale, if we all just sit back and allow things like this to go on, it just continues to foster a culture in which rape and abuse become normalized and seen as "okay". In general, I believe that we don't neccessarily have to totally change or sanitize the images of women in the media- there's nothing essentially wrong with images of beautiful or sexy women. Even displaying images of promiscuity or sexual invitation is okay. They'r all realities of life. However, these images need to be diluted by more images of normal, everyday women so that people can better recognize the line between fiction and reality.