It’s only been about two weeks since Brett Kavanaugh was voted into the Supreme Court as the newest of nine justices, and if you’re like me, you were pretty angry. Maybe you ranted, maybe you posted an angry tweet or maybe you just sat in silent awe as once again, our country’s leaders failed to listen to the democratic society they claimed to be representing.
Now it’s been about two weeks and the rants have stopped, the angry tweets are decreasing and we’re all left in silence. The issue is, Kavanaugh, and more importantly, the topic of sexual assault has since faded from the media. Why have we already stopped talking about it? Are we really going to ignore the fact that our new Supreme Court Justice was never proven not guilty for multiple accounts of sexual assault?
While it’s not uncommon of the media and the people to move on from a hot topic rather quickly, just look at the fight against gun violence with the marches that came and went with nearly no change, and maybe this is the broader problem we need to be looking at.
Are our attention spans really that short; do we really care so much for only so little amount of time? Shouldn’t we be doing our sister and brother survivors a favor by never keeping quiet until we’ve done all we can to bring peace to them and ensure no one else has to experience what they did?
The answer is yes, but the problem runs deeper than that. Given who’s currently in power in this country, we’re likely going to be done talking about sexual assault until another relevant figure either comes forward with an accusation or is accused. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We need to be the voices for the voiceless. We need to keep talking about sexual assault because ignoring it won’t make it stop, ignoring it will only breed more opportunities for it to happen in silence. How do we do this?
Keep the conversations going. Even if you’re like me and you’re extremely exhausted of talking and being angry that Kavanaugh was elected, try to still continue talking about it. Their goal is for the chatter around the accusations to die down so much so that maybe we will forget, but if we keep the chatter going, we won’t forget.
We owe it to each other for our safety, equality and democracy to speak out so others feel safe to continue speaking up. We need to let this not make survivors feel like they need to hide in shadows but rather that they should bring their experiences to the light. We can’t let another white privileged male make our country take two steps back. Don’t stop talking about sexual assault until sexual assault stops. Period.
(And vote November 6th)