17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape according to Rape Abuse & Incest National Network. Take a minute to let that set in. That means that approximately 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime stated by Rape Abuse & Incest National Network. With these staggering statistics in my head, I wondered how I could possibly reach the maximum amount of people to bring awareness to. My next thought process was how I could effectively advocate this to these people. This led me to a social media platform to spread my visions and thoughts. This by far is the best way to reach a broader audience. In an article titled, “Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World”, it was estimated that by 2017, 2.55 billion people will be on some form of social media; not to mention the fact that the majority of people using social media are youths, an important faction to try and reach for me. It may be cliché but children really are the future and if you can educate them now you could potentially change the world later.
I knew that developing this project would be difficult because sexual assault is a very touchy subject for so many people, whether they were a victim their selves or know someone who was a victim. Furthermore, some people may feel that they do not know anyone who has been affected by this or they aren’t directly affected. So, they don’t feel the need to advocate for it. There were a number of things that I could have chosen for a topic. Nonetheless, this subject was most prevalent to me. One of the strengths of this topic is that I know someone personally that this topic affects everyday. Consequently, I am able to empathize with my friend. Feeling strongly about the awareness of this topic is the best advantage that I have. I knew coming into this project that I could get a first hand account into the mindset of a person that has had to deal with a sexual assault. Using social media I could reach a broad spectrum of people in the hopes of spreading sexual assault awareness. The drawbacks of my project is that not to many people that have been subjected to an sexual assault are very willing to share their stories all over the internet with strangers. Knowing that, I felt the need to limit myself to visual images using statistics on sexual assault.
My goal during my project was to create images that could not be ignored. I wanted to make people think of things they choose to ignore. I wanted to make a change. I hoped to change rape culture from something that is not the norm anymore. It has saddened me that this is something that is not talked about more. I know it is sad but sometimes you have to talk about things that you do not want to in order to make a change. We get at least one sexual assault incident to our emails and phones here at Penn State at least in the increment of two weeks. Half of the people here that get these alerts do not think twice about them. That is exactly what I want to change: the way we now think of rape and sexual assaults, change how desensitized we have become to sensitive incidents in our world.
This project proved to be difficult in a few ways for me. Firstly, because I am a very sensitive person and I can just about empathizes with anyone, even if I do not particularly know the person. Just reading the statistics and stories and thinking of all these people as one individual person took a toll on me. What was challenging was getting people to help. Originally I wanted to get people to hold up signs with some sort of quote or fact but I found that people girls in general did not want to be directly affiliated with sexual assault or didn’t want there face to be in it. That set me back because I wanted that portrayal of normal girls. Later on I was able to convince them to let me photograph them with a different platform. What I got from this was that they did not want to be directly involved or affiliated with this cause. Why? I couldn’t answer that but what I do know is that majority of sexual assault crimes go unreported. People not wanting to support this serious crime or believe the victims may be main reasons they continue to go unreported. Furthermore, one of my main reasons of taking on this subject for my project was to tell a story for a friend that could not. That was the most rewarding part of this project for me. Doing something selfless for someone else and hopefully providing strength for another people in the process. It was rewarding for me to try and bring this topic to the surface
Given the chance to do this project over, what I would do differently is use a different type of social media platform from which I used. Twitter was the main social media platform that I used. If I had the opportunity do this project again I would focus more on Tumblr and Instagram. I would have used one of the two instead of Twitter because they both are more blog-like. I feel like I could have potentially reached a broader base of support on those two networks. Using Twitter I was limited to 140 characters. I now feel that the best way to reach out to people would have been to try and get stories from people willing to submit. In addition, I plan on continuing my advocacy project outside of the classroom. I will start my project on how I originally planned. I would definitely like this project to take flight and flourish from support from both victims and supporters.
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