Before I came to United State, I already have the sense that most American people are
open-minded, especially in issues about sex. As an international student, it really took me
some time to get used to how my American friends think about sex and sexual activities. In
China, as long as I know, most females do not have sexual experience until they enter the
junior year in college. What I learned from my American friends was that most American
people have this experience much earlier than Chinese people. However, I saw a news
when I was searching for my topic of this class and I was surprised by the news and the
points that it showed. The news is about a new law that redefines consent to have sexual
activities at college and I learned that sexual assault is an serious issue that concerned by
females on campus from this news. The thing that made me surprised was that there are
many females in colleges experienced sex assault and they did not get protection, since
there was no specific rules about how to defines sexual consent and sometimes people just
think the victims were voluntary to do the activities abut they actually not. Thus, I
continued to follow the news about this issue and the new law, to see how people think
about it and to see how it works in reality.
During my research, I found that sexual assault is surely an problem that need attention by
both colleges and their students. It was found that a sizeable percentage of undergraduate
female students have experienced sexual assault when they were incapacitated and unable
to provide consent to do the activity and the specific percentage is 11.1%, according to the
campus sexual assault (CSA) study (Fisher). The majority of the female students, about
84%, who did the survey and experienced incapacitated sexual assault said that they were
victims of alcohol or other drug (AOD) enabled. Which means that they were either drunk,
or were given a drug without their knowledge or consent and the drugs they were given are
commonly called as “date rape drugs” (Fisher).
Another finding of the CSA Study was that possibility of experiencing sexual assault is
higher after entering colleges than what it was before entering colleges. However, 90% or
more do not report the assault (Fisher), since the victims or survivors think no one will
believe them and they think that legal and medical authorities will be hostile against them.
