Editorial: Despicable

We are a generation of tolerance.

Our parents and society taught us to be tolerant of others' political views, ethnicities and sexual orientations. As college students, we tolerate the roommates we don't like because we're bound by a lease. We tolerate being the generation of college graduates with no jobs because we have no power to change it.

But the thing is, it's easy to tolerate. You don't have to agree with anything. You just have to keep your mouth shut.

On our campus and in our town, we've even come to tolerate a grave crime. We have come to tolerate sexual assault. To tolerate is to let something exist. With the continuous stream of news about our classmates and neighbors being drugged and raped, it seems we've not just tolerated sexual assault, we've let it flourish.

"Intolerable" has been President Engstrom's go-to word in describing our campus' view on sexual assault. We might suggest despicable.

It's despicable that our generation has become so tolerant that we've forgotten how to say, "Don't even think about it."

We've muddled the line between right and wrong. By not acting, we've encouraged even normal people to think it's okay to sleep with a drunk girl who threw herself at them. Rapists aren't always the cold-blooded villians from movies. The reality is, they share our classrooms, they're in our circles of friends, we see — and even talk with — them in keg lines and at bar counters. We refuse to accept we are friends with people who could do this. We've been tolerant so long we begin to believe that under certain circumstances, it's not rape.

It is.

We're so tolerant we rarely see these people as victims do. To the one in five women who will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime, these friends, these coworkers, these fellow students — call them anything but a rapist — will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

We tolerate sexual assault because we don't actively stop it. We see the guy in the corner of the party, scoping out the drunkest girl in the room, but when he approaches her we pretend we didn't see. During educational events we distract ourselves because we've heard it all before. When we learn a friend is accused of rape, we don't say anything out of disbelief. We've become so tolerant that many victims feel they're the ones at fault, not the "friends" who violated them.

The only thing more despicable than the fact many victims know their attacker is that we know them, too, and we don't stop them from thinking it's okay.

Missoula, it's time we quit talking about sexual assaults and start stopping them. It's time we quit just helping victims once it's too late and start acting against assailants. We mean it when we say they're despicable.

Editorials are discussed and jointly written by the Kaimin Editorial Board, which consists of the paper's section editors.