Dear anyone who found the April 24 “Rape day” funny,

I want to start this off by saying that there was no real evidence that the event of a “National Rape Day” took place. In an article from USA Today, Tiktok stated that “While we have not found evidence on our platform of any videos related to this subject, our safety team is remaining vigilant and we will remove content that violates our polices.”

Despite this bittersweet news, the fact that this “trend” was created is still an issue. Everyone has found themselves making inappropriate jokes. It’s about time we all come to the understanding that things like race, disability, sexual harassment, and ethnicity are off limits for jokes, sexual assault is no different.

One out of four women have experienced sexual assault at some point in their lives. To put that into perspective, if you have 100 women in a room, at least 25 of them have experienced sexual assault. If that’s too abstract for you, say you have twelve women friends. In this scenario, at least three of them would have experienced sexual harassment. These kinds of experiences can leave women traumatized and in a very vulnerable state.

This “joke” is  insensitive to survivors and causes panic for women everywhere. What may be a funny joke to one person may be a serious thing to another. It’s frightening to think that a “National Rape Day” could give someone an excuse to cause harm to a innocent woman. Already, women are on edge as we carry our keys as weapons at night to protect ourselves, pretend to be on the phone when passing by large groups of men, and share our location with all of our loved ones just in case we are in danger. Yet, these tactics don’t always work. Women are on alert at all times on a day to day basis, imagine the panic and fear “National Rape Day” caused.

Rape isn’t funny, nor will it ever be funny.  As a young women, hearing this for the first time,  I was terrified, shocked, and I am sure that was a shared feeling. Some things just aren’t meant to be joked about, women should be protected and feel safe. No one should have to live in fear.

Sincerely,

A young woman