The deliberation I went to was on sexual assault and the ways that we can combat sexual assault in society through education through education, social media and the government. I chose this specific deliberation to go to because through my research into sexual education I think there is a way to combat sexual assault if we American society would just make it a priority. Sexual assault is aloes such an important topic to have on college campuses. We can’t go a week without getting a text alert about a suspected assault.

 

Overall the deliberation went fairly well. The way that they had their deliberation set up was very different from the way we had ours. They brought up the topics and then posed questions to the audience and it was mostly audience lead on the discussion which I though was kind of weird. However, we had great conversations. There were two survivors in the audience of sexual assault and it was interesting to hear their perspective. What I found was interesting was the differences in perspective between males and females. When talking about proper punishment for rapists, one person said that he thinks that after a certain number of years, sexual offenders should be able to lose their title because they served their time and they had done enough. I had to bring up the fact that if sexual assault survivors had to live the rest of their life with the offender’s decision, then the sexual offender had to live his/her life with their decision. Another interesting point was that people kept bring up the fact that people sometimes make false reports and how that can hurt the person accused. I looked up the numbers and only about 2 in every 1000 cases, reported and not reported were false accusations. The final discussion point that stuck out to me was that I brought up the Brock Turner case where he raped an unconscious girl behind a dumpster and only get 6 months in jail because the judge had deemed the “he (Turner) had been through enough.” He only served about a month. When I brought it up, one male said that it was one case and that plenty of rapists get years in prison. The thing is, most rapes go unreported because of stories like this one.

 

The one thing I wish the deliberation had done differently was I wish that had come prepared with more statistics and data surrounding the topics and sub topics. I think that would have helped with some of the conversations. Also, because it was so audience heavy in the discussion, I don’t think they were able to hit everything they wanted to that was in their Issues guide. All in all, it was a great discussion and deliberation and it did open my eyes up to other perspectives and ideas surrounding sexual assault.

One thought on “Deliberation Reflection

  1. Hey, the deliberation you went to sounds really cool, I’m glad that a lot of people seem to be addressing sexual assault because I think it is an important issue that needs to be talked about and seeing that people are willing to talk about it just makes me so hopeful for the future. I really enjoyed how you broke up your paragraphs it made it super easy to read and follow your train of thought both important when writing and formatting a blog. So you said that one of the things you wish had gone better was “I think that would have helped with some of the conversations. Also, because it was so audience heavy in the discussion” but honestly, in my opinion, this doesn’t seem like a bad thing because deliberations are supposed to be audience participation, and discussion, and what they think so I really don’t see this as a drawback to the deliberation.The discussion points that you mentioned seem super powerful and just from that information I can tell that the deliberation you went to was one that was thoughtful and interesting to be a part of.

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