You can read this and other posts by a wide range of women’s health clinicians, advocates and activists on the Our Bodies Ourselves webpage.

The new academic year has started and once again students are attending seminars on staying safe on campus. These orientation workshops typically focus on tips for women like:  “Take control of your online life;” “Make others earn your trust;” “If you see something, say something;” “Be aware & stay alert;” “Make plans & be prepared;” “Party smart;” “Be a good friend;” “Stick together in groups.”

I’m sure all of this is good advice, but it misses what I have come to see as the crux of the matter: Teaching girls and women that if they just try hard enough they can avoid sexual assault places responsibility for rape on the shoulders of targets and potential targets rather than on the shoulders of perpetrators and of political and cultural power-brokers.

As a parent and an educator, I feel obligated to tell my children and students the real truth: Rape is a weapon used to amass, exert and enforce power. It has nothing to do with the behavior or attitude or psychology or sociability or preparedness or intelligence or skirt length or alcohol use of particular girls and women.

Here are the real “tips” that our children and students need to know.

In 2012 there was (brief) international outrage over the brutal gang-rape of a student on a Delhi bus in 2012. This was far from an isolated incident. Women and girls in India are raped on buses, in schools, in bathrooms and at home. They are raped in the context of inter-religious, inter-ethnic and inter-caste violence. They are raped for being educated and they are raped for being uneducated. According to a recent International Men and Gender Equality Survey, nearly one in four Indian men has committed sexual violence at some point in their lives. Rape in India must properly be seen in the context of femicide: The gender ratio in India is at its most unbalanced since 1947, with 1000 boys for every 927 girls. The “missing girls” are eliminated through selective abortion, infanticide, abandonment, preferential feeding of male children and adults, through torturing or killing young married women for their dowries. Tip #1: Politely thank your university or community for rape crisis hotlines and for those shiny whistles they give you so that you can make a scary noise when you are assaulted. And then insist that they invest in educating and socializing men about women’s humanity and that they put significant resources into ending gender violence at its source.

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Boko Haram, a militant Islamic group active in Nigeria, has – for several years – been forcing Christian women to convert to Islam and taking them as wives. It has also carried out mass kidnappings and is still holding captive more than 200 girls soldiers abducted in April from a school in Chibok. The group released a video in which the group’s apparent leader called the girls “slaves” and threatened to “sell them in the market” and “marry them out” rather than let them get educations. According to a recent article in the New York Times, “Although about 50 [of the girls] escaped, not a single one of the remaining girls has been found, and despite international offers of help, the Nigerian government has been slow to act. Tip #3: Write for your campus newspaper, tweet, talk, yell, become an expert in social media: Help keep the violence committed against girls and women in the public eye.

In an excellent on-line essay for NOW, Jenna Archer itemizes increases in incidents of gender-based violence in Central America in recent years. “Rates of femicide (the targeted, systematic killing of women and girls), sexual violence, kidnapping, forced disappearance and unjustified detention are on the rise in the region, causing thousands of women to flee Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico due to their well-justified fear of being raped, murdered or tortured.” Calling out the “pandemic of gender-based violence,” Archer notes that, “Rates of gender-based violence in Honduras rose sharply after the 2009 coup d’état and during the subsequent regime of Porfirio Lobo. Between 2002 and 2010, the rate of femicide increased 257 percent and, today, the second most prevalent cause of death of women is gender-based violence.” And, “Girls may be kidnapped and forced into sex and drug trafficking. In some regions, it has gotten to the point that parents no longer allow girls to go to school because they fear for their safety.” Tip #4: Get together with friends and teachers to learn and and talk about the “pandemic of gender-based violence.”

Thousands of Central Americans travel through Mexico every year attempting to reach the United States. But because they make the trip illegally, they are vulnerable to kidnappings, extortion and robbery – with organized criminal groups such as Los Zetas often acting in cahoots with law enforcement authorities. Women face the additional reality of widespread sexual violence. According to Rev. Prisciliano Pedraza, a priest and director of a shelter for migrants in the town of Altar, near the Arizona border, “The women passing through here know that they’re going to be raped. … Migrants are a vulnerable group, and the most vulnerable among them are women.” While there is no systematic tracking of rates of violence, Father Pedraza puts the figure at 90 percent of all female migrants. Tip #5: Support candidates who support true immigration reform.

Across the United States an estimated 70% of incarcerated women have been victims of physical and sexual violence. With only a few exceptions, all of the Boston-area criminalized women with whom I work have suffered sexual abuse. About half of the women were sexually abused as children. To escape, many of them ran away from home (and so were exposed to additional violence on the streets) and turned to drugs to “self-medicate.” As drug users they became vulnerable to sexual violence at the hands of dealers, johns, prison guards and – as one woman puts it – “shady police who make you do things for them.” And, even in this era of the Violence Against Women Act, the vast majority of rapists are not arrested. According to estimates only 5% of rapists are convicted and 3% spend any time in jail. Tip #6: Don’t count on the police or the courts to save you from sexual assault.

My new book describing my work with criminalized women is now available through Amazon and other bookstores. You can read more here.