Another front page article in the Tennessean last week about how colleges are not doing enough to stop sexual assaults on campus. And with what’s happening on college campuses these days it’s no wonder the paper’s editor and writers are concerned. We all should be concerned, because we all are responsible!
Yes, I said all of us are responsible for the “pig sty mentality” displayed and portrayed by many young people. We, parents, teachers, professors, doctors, minister, movie actors, authors, TV networks, and yes, especially Hollywood, are all responsible.
Let me talk a bit about how we “adults” are setting the stage for these horrific attacks on college kids.
We watch movies and sit coms on T V and on the big screen which represent sex as entertainment and often as a competitive sport.
Porn is everywhere. No need to look for it on line, it hits you in the face when you open your computer. Some college professors tell students porn is OK, most sociologist tell us it destroys men’s perception of women and even of themselves. It’s always bad!
No one teaches respect for women! When I was in my “formative” years, middle of last century we were taught to have “Fear of the Lord”, and “Fear of women”. Not that we were to cower and shake in their presence, but we needed to love them enough to never hurt or offend them. Most of all, we were taught to respect our mothers. Now days, parents often fear their kids, they are afraid if they correct their kids behavior, the little darlings won’t like them anymore. I can still hear my mother say. “I don’t care if you don’t like me. You don’t need to like me. You just need to do what I say.” If we didn’t, Dad would be all over us.
“Listen to your mother,” he would begin. “What’s wrong with you? Respect her and all your elders, for crying out loud!” And when he was finished we were crying out loud!
Dads teach their boys how to treat women by how they treat their wife, their daughters, their sisters and their mother. Big problem today, is more than half our kids don’t have a live-with father. Imagine sending your kids to a school that had no teachers. That’s what so many of our sons face. And, too often boys who do have a father hear him “dissing” their mom just like she is complaining about him.
Another cultural problem we have is lack of what folks used to call “Churching”. How many kids know that there is a God given commandment calling us to “Honor our father and mother”? Or another forbidding 
adultery, which also includes fornication. (I wonder how many college kids even know what fornication is). Somehow these Commandments seem to include everything – they tell us not to “covet” our neighbor’s wife or goods. For those not familiar with the word “covet”, synonyms are; want, crave, desire, hanker, long for, yearn for, and wish for. Knowing and living these simple rules makes living the good life much easier. Perhaps we should begin again, as in colonial times, to teach them in school. A review of them at the time of college orientation might be a good thing, too.
Another reason for such violent assaults is the lack of good and real sex education. For many years I taught a 2 session class in sex education in a Wisconsin public school. I would start off by asking the seventh grade boys “What are we going to talk about today?” There would be an immediate cacophony filling the room with “Sex, sex,” and many words, both proper and profane.”
I would quite them and ask, “What is sex?” I always knew even more profanity would be generated, but I quickly calmed the over-charged boys and asked them to take out their school ID card. “What’s that word right after your name?” I would ask. Again, they call out “Sex’, but without the enthusiasm. Then I would get them to acknowledge that sex (at that time anyhow) meant boy or girl, male or female, man or woman.
“Today we are going to talk about how boys like you and girls like your classmates can become men and women of character.” I would continue.
Together we looked up the definition of character and then talked about how people show character.
We talked about how to treat women, especially your mother and girlfriend. Open the door for her, let her walk in first, how to seat a girl at the table, how to guide her through a crowd with your hand in front of her. We even talked about avoiding offensive language around girls and women. I was always surprised by the interest the boys had in these now passé gestures of respect. Remember, this was before the feminist tried to stop anyone from showing them respect and back when there not more genders than trees.
We finally got around to talking about body parts and sexual activity. Most of the boys already knew that sex should be reserved for married couples, but they wondered why, and we talked about that. We also talked about STD’s and Birth control, rape, including date rape, and all the other things they inquired about. And each year they added more questions probably prompted by their older friends or brothers who had taken the course the year before.
I taught that course for more than 10 years and never had a complaint from parents. I don’t know how many of these boys stayed true to their teaching, but I do know that there were not as many sexual assaults back then as we see today.
Studies show that “abstinence only” sex-ed doesn’t work, I knew that way back in the eighties, so we talked about everything but, I was never afraid to recommend “keeping it in your pants!” It really is the only solution that works!
To make any progress in this fight against sexual assault on campus we need total commitment from all the people mentioned above in the second paragraph. So, talk with your kid’s teachers, their doctor, their friend’s parents, and the school board; write letters to the media, your senators, and representatives. Get them and yourselves on the band wagon for teaching the things that will make sex assault rare. Then and only then can you send your child off to college without having to worry about sexual assault.
Stop blaming the colleges, they get what our culture produces.