Issue date: 10/6/08 Section: Opinions

Our View
Situation:	About 500 people participated in Thursday's annual Take Back the Night march.
Stance:	The annual march keeps growing stronger and awareness is the best prevention.

Five hundred people gathered around the Campus Pond Thursday evening to support and shout the message of Take Back the Night. Five hundred people from Charleston want their community to be free from sexual abuse and violence. Their role was to break the silence by marching through campus chanting epithets like, "2…4…6…8/No more date rape!" as loudly as possible while carrying signs and luminaries.

Recognizing that sexual violence can happen to anyone at any time is imperative to stopping it. Whether you decide to carry mace in your backpack on nights you know you're working late or to take a basic self-defense class, you're protecting yourself.

Even if you do something small, like telling a roommate you'll call when you reach your destination, is protecting yourself.

We need to constantly be aware of our vulnerabilities, which is why we need to find ways to counter them.

Sexual violence so easily slips under the radar because it takes on so many forms. Types of sexual assault, according to www.takebackthenight.org, include date or stranger rape, stalking, childhood sexual abuse, marital rape and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual victims. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network reports, "Sexual assault is one of the most underreported crimes, with 60 percent still being left unreported. If a rape is reported, there is a 50.8 percent chance of an arrest."

The most startling statistic is that, "15 of 16 (sexual offenders) walk free."

Aside from sexual violence cases being difficult to prove in court, another reason many cases go unreported is because nearly two-thirds of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.

On a brighter note, sexual assaults and rapes have declined 60 percent in the last 15 years, sparing more than 2.5 million people in the United States from suffering the trauma that comes with sexual violence.

The decline shows that we're recognizing the problem and taking steps, such as filling the campus with people demanding to Take Back the Night, to bring awareness to the cause. However, as recently as 2006, the number of people sexually assaulted in the United States was 272,350 and that does not include victims ages 12 and under.

We can't continue to let nearly 300,000 people become victims of sexual attacks every year. Stopping sexual violence is not simple, but awareness has brought about its decline.

When someone is sexually assaulted in the United States every two minutes, we know to take sexual violence seriously and we continuously need to find better ways to protect ourselves.

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