Last week, JLF’s Becki Gray was featured in an installment of NC SPIN’s “After SPIN!” Gray spoke with the show’s host, Tom Campbell, as well as fellow guest, journalist and filmmaker Cash Michaels, about sexual assault on college campuses.
In a very personal and poignant moment, Becki shared her family’s story:
My younger daughter was raped when she was a sophomore when she was at UNC Wilmington. So, my family has dealt with this on a very personal level.
There are three things that I’d like to mention that I think we should be looking at.
One is ways that you can prevent these things to the extent that you can. Things like ensuring doors and windows lock, having parking garages and hallways that are well lit, providing escorts for women after dark, [etc.]…
Then there is also the issue of, when these things do occur, the culture we have around this. When my daughter was raped, she had commented numerous times that the police officers and the detectives seemed to be much more interested in how much she had to drink that evening rather than what these two men did to her when they broke into her house. You know, the way that women are treated as if they are to blame for what has happened to them…
The third point I want to make – and I think this is something that we don’t talk enough about, and I think that it is absolutely critical in this discussion – is we need to talk to our boys and our sons… Nothing replaces the conversations and what takes place around kitchen tables, with families, within the faith community, with aunts and uncles and moms and dads and people who care about kids…
We talk about the women who are victims of this and the women that are survivors, and how we can help them move forward. I don’t think we talk enough about “wat are we doing for the young men?” “What are we talking about with the boys?” “Why aren’t we raising better boys.”
Watch Becki Gray’s full comments and hear her story here.
