Just a little Warning – read the title and decide if you want to listen

So, let’s say there are 3 criminal trials going on today. In one, a 52-year-old hospital maintenance worker is on trial for allegedly raping a 28-year-old nurse at knifepoint, as she was getting in her car in the parking garage after work.

In another, a 47-year-old man in on trial for allegedly raping a 20-year-old man in an alley behind a bar – the alleged victim was known in the neighborhood to trade sexual favors now and then for drug money.

In the third, a 40-year-old man is on trial for allegedly raping his 40-year-old ex-wife after having dinner and drinks to discuss their teenage son. She was in his hotel room when the alleged incident occurred.

Hi, I’m Ann Coleman and this is Speaking of Teens. I’m here every Tuesday with a new episode sharing science-based insight into parenting your teen or tween. My teenage son went through a couple of really difficult years. I not only didn’t know how to help, but I was also inadvertently making things worse. When we finally got on the right track, I decided to learn everything I could about the science of parenting adolescents so I could help you with what I was lacking.

I want you to think a minute about your initial gut reaction to each of those brief sets of facts. Without knowing the legal definition of rape but based solely on what you know of that crime. What questions would you have? What assumptions would you make – about either the defendants or the victims? What would you feel you’d need to know about the situation? Pause the podcast for a second and think – back it up and listen again if you need to.

Now what does this have to do with sexual consent and teenagers? Actually, a lot more than you might think. To even understand why sexual consent is such a huge topic – especially for adolescents, we have to examine the backdrop of societal issues and gender stereotypes at play, how both our boys and girls are impacted very early in their lives by these stereotypes and how it intensifies in early adolescence. We need to understand what we’re up against to understand what we need to do to help.

I didn’t really realize that when I first began researching the issue of consent. But I almost immediately found myself deep in the rabbit hole, which led me all the way back to this issue of rape culture. I’d never heard this reference before anywhere. But after reading about it, I certainly understand, and agree with the premise.

No matter what country you live in, you likely live in a “rape culture”, the definition of which has been molded over the past 50 years or so by sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and others.

Actually, the term was first used by feminists in the mid-1970s in the US to describe the culture in America at that time and raise awareness that women were victims of rape and assault as the norm – that these things happened, unchallenged – that rape is used as a show of power rather than for sexual gratification and that this culture was a direct result of male dominance over women and the misogynistic and sexist views perpetuated in our society. And yes – that might sound a little extreme but here me out. No one was talking about this stuff before then. It wasn’t a topic of discussion. People didn’t hear victims’ stories; it wasn’t seen as something that commonly happened. It was largely swept under the rug.

Over time, the term has evolved where it now generally means everything that comes together in a culture that makes sexual violence accepted as the norm. Gender stereotypes, the significance placed on female beauty, attitudes, social norms, and popular media messages – plus police and justice systems that generally protect assailants, blame and shame victims and place all responsibility on women to avoid being sexually assaulted.

We’re talking about everything from jokes, movies, music, and news media to our public policies - are stacked in such a way that make sexual violence part of our everyday life (if not downright encouraged). At the very least, all of this reinforces people’s biases – our biases regarding which victims should be believed - under what circumstances a real rape takes place, including elements like whether the victim knew the perpetrator, where they were when it happened, what clothes the victim wore, the victim’s profession, whether or how much physical resistance was involved, the victims sexual preference, their gender, biological sex.

In other words, we end up asking questions that have no bearing on whether or not they were sexually assaulted. At the very worst, this culture we’ve created allows perpetrators (mostly men) to victimize (mostly women) almost unchecked.

Yes, there are laws, but for those laws to make a difference, girls and women have to a) understand what sexual assault looks like, b) be willing to report it and be willing to take the stand against the assailant. But before she can even take the stand, the police must believe her and be willing to arrest the assailant and charge them appropriately and the prosecutor must be willing to take the case to trial. And for that, they have to decide if it’s winnable – because God forbid, we waist time and taxpayer dollars to try and put a rapist behind bars and prevent him from doing it again if it’s a loser of a case and screws up the DA’s winning streak (and this is true even though 54% of district attorneys in the US are female)! Not only that but even if it goes to trial, those issues that may have caused the prosecutor to hesitate about taking it, will play a role in how the jury decides the case.

So, go back and think about those 3 scenarios I presented to you in the beginning of the episode: in the first case an older male, jumped out in a parking garage with a knife, and raped a young female. In the second, an older male raped a younger male in an alley and the victim is known to have traded sex for drugs in the past. In the third, an ex-husband rapes the woman in his hotel room where she went voluntarily. Which one do you think will be the easiest to win? And why do you think that? It’s because of your own biases. None of us are immune; it’s the culture we grew up in.

These biases run deep. And whether you believe you live in a culture that encourages rape, just abides it, or simply makes it more difficult to prosecute rape, there’s just no denying the facts; how our culture thinks about rape, sexual assault, and the victims. What did you think about the first case where the stranger jumps out and attacks his victim at knifepoint, in the parking garage? Did you think to yourself “well, that’s a real rape”? And what about the second? The young man who takes drugs and sometimes trades sex for money – he alleges this much older man raped him in an alley behind a bar. What are you saying to yourself? How can we hold a man accountable for raping someone who’s done this sort of thing before for money? How can we know that’s not what was happening here? Where’s the weapon? Did he fight back? Was the alleged rapist known to be gay? What if he’s married with kids? What if they’d left the bar together – a gay bar?

And what about the third case? She’d been married to the guy, obviously they’d had sex many times before – they have at least one child together. She voluntarily met him for dinner and went to his hotel room with him. And then she says she was raped? How can we believe that? What was she thinking going back to his hotel room? How was she dressed? Did she have this in mind when they met? Is she still single? Was she beaten? Did he use a weapon?

Studies and the decisions in these types of cases prove that most of us (the general “us” – people in society, on juries) we want to see that it was a “real rape”, meaning, the assailant was a stranger, used a weapon, the victim was totally innocent (in appearance, where he or she was, what they were doing), they fought the assailant with everything they had and were visibly injured in the process – that’s a “real rape”.

When the victim is not so innocent – maybe their “gay” or “trans”, maybe they use drugs, maybe they really like sex and do it every chance they get, maybe they take things or money for sex on a regular basis, maybe they were wearing slutty-looking clothes, just begging for attention, maybe they invited the assailant into their home, their bedroom or went to a hotel room with them, maybe they were drinking or partying with drugs, maybe they were on top of the bar stripping and asking for dollar bills? What if they’d been on a date? What if they’d been dating for months, years? What if they’d been friends for years, been married to each other before, had sex with each other before, many times? What if she said she wanted to have sex but then once he was undressed, she changed her mind? What if they were both undressed and just as he was about to penetrate her, she said, you know what – never mind. What if he’d just thrown down $250 for dinner and drinks? What if he was beyond stopping? I mean that hurts a guy, you know – blue balls I think they call it.

Do you see why maybe it’s called “rape culture”? Maybe it’s not “by design”. Maybe it’s not all the males getting together to actively perpetuate this attitude of “boys will be boys and girls will be sluts”. Nevertheless, that IS the narrative. Just listen to popular song lyrics, rap songs are especially harsh - not all of them of course, but they’re definitely the worst. And our kids (both girls and boys) sing them word for word. The mostly male rappers, rap about bitches and hos and violence towards women. The degradation of women is a running theme in this music.

Women who enjoy men and sex, dress sexy, or flirt a lot are looked down upon. She’s a whore, a Ho’, a slut, a Stacey. We tell our girls not to wear their skirts too short or their tops too low. Be careful about going out at night – always go with a friend. Park only in well-lit parking lots. Never lose sight of your drink. Don’t drink too much – especially at frat parties. Always meet a first date in a very public place. How many rape whistles, pepper spray cannisters, and handguns are sold to women each year for “protection”? Protection from what? MEN.

Our society puts ALL the burden all on women and girls, not to look a certain way, be certain places or invite too much attention or else some boy or man, who cannot possibly be expected to control his masculine urges, may decide they’re just too sexy not to catcall, manhandle or assault.

We’ve been electing and appointing these males to the highest offices in our country – all countries for ages. They’ve taken advantage of and made lude comments about women both before or during the time in office. They’ve had affairs, had casual sex, and been given blow jobs in the oval office. But it didn’t put a dent in their power. Instead, they’re revered as national heroes. They’re honored with statues and libraries are built in their name. Misogyny, sexism, the patriarchy are not something I’ve ever spent a lot of time thinking about. As a matter of fact, I’ve probably done my share of eyerolling when any of the topics come up. BUT that’s because I’ve never really known much about any of it – what it really meant. I just didn’t pay any attention. But in relation to rape culture and how this all ties to our teens and sexual consent, I do think we need to understand how it all coalesces in society.

We live in a patriarchal society. You do – whether you’re in the US, Australia, England, Africa, China, it’s a male-dominant society. Men are in charge – they run the government (but for a few women sprinkled in here and there), they run the business world, the academic world, the social world, financial world, the religious world – even the world at home. Men, for the most part, hold all the power. It’s the innerworkings within and between these worlds and all the systems and beliefs, values and norms that create an overall masculine-valued privilege. A structure where women or being feminine is undervalued – the bottom line is that a patriarchal society creates gender inequality. Then sexism and misogyny sort of work together to make sure the patriarchal society stays intact. Sexism being a kind of set of ideas around what women are good for and what roles they should play in society. And misogyny is kind of unspoken force - deeply engrained in our culture (our customs and social norms and mores, unconscious biases) it operates to keep women in their place (in our own damn lane) - especially those who threaten male dominance in some way. So, these unconscious biases (women can be just as guilty of it as men) it’s how we’ve grown up. It’s what we know.

For example: Women should fight like hell if they’re being sexually assaulted – let’s see those bruises. If she doesn’t want to be raped or assaulted, she shouldn’t dress like a slut, he shouldn’t dress like a women, she shouldn’t go to a bar alone, he shouldn’t drink so much, she shouldn’t have asked him back to her place. So, all of these things come together in our culture – a rape culture – to perpetuate it. A patriarchal system, sexism, misogyny.

In the past few years with the #metoo movement, we’ve made tiny inroads into holding men accountable for their dominant, exploitive, abusive behavior. We’ve taken down old men who’ve no doubt been doing it for years and years and getting away with it – Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, even my sweet Matt Lauer. But these guys didn’t just wake up at 30, 40 or 50 and decide to be a predator. Nope. They were groomed to be, by the culture we’ve all grown up in. These influences, those biases that even we have; it’s engrained and reinforced in our boys.

And let me go ahead and say, sexual assault is, of course, not only a male to female heterosexual thing. Sexual assault can happen to anyone and be perpetrated by anyone. As a matter of fact, it appears LGBTQA+ people are even more likely to be sexually assaulted than straight people. It’s only for simplicity sake that I’ll talk here in terms of boy to girl sexual interaction. But just know, if your son or daughter is part of the LGBTQA+ community – no matter their sexual orientation, sexual preference, or pronouns, of course, they can be the victim or the perpetrator of sexual violence and need to understand consent.

 

So, what is it that begins happening to our boys during puberty that starts this whole ball rolling? What is it that makes them feel so entitled to act the way they do towards girls (and I’m talking in general terms here – the overall plural “boys”)? What is it about their experience during adolescence that molds and solidifies their ideas and behaviors towards girls? In a story from the Guardian in Australia last year, that looked at the issue of rape culture in elite private schools, the writer tapped several experts and researchers for answers. It appears that the gender behavioral norms that are introduced to boys when they’re little, are then morphed into something much more aggressive and negative when boys, as a group, begin to influence each other just as they are entering puberty.

Experts say that things really begin to change in a boy’s life between years or grade 6 and 7. They come together to start forming this “masculinity code” for lack of a better term. They put restrictions on themselves as a group; “boys don’t like girls” “girls suck” “no girls allowed”. They adopt this view of girls -looking at them without empathy; “they’re just not human”.

And as I learned from listening to David Livingstone Smith, when any group of people begin looking at another group of people as less than human, it makes it much easier for them to hurt them – even kill them. Just like the Nazi’s did to the Jews who they called rats and the Hutus did to the Tutsis, who they called cockroaches. Dehumanization makes it easy to inflict pain on another person.

So, boys, at around the age of 12 or 13, when puberty is just getting started, place all their eggs in the masculinity basket and start picking on those boys who’re not feeling masculine – they’re excluded from the “pack”. So, the type of masculinity that boys are taught by other boys to aspire to, as one of the experts in the Guardian put it, is the “aggressively heterosexual” type of masculinity. This type of masculinity then is reinforced with negative and positive rewards, depending on how typically masculine they are. Bonus points for being misogynistic (all the bad boy behavior we hate to imagine our sons would ever be involved in); making degrading comments about girls behind their backs, who’s hot and who’s not, who’s done what with whom and whether it was good or not, even daring each other to do things with girls, getting pictures of them and that sort of awfulness. It’s rewarded in boy world.

The problem, of course, is that this type of behavior is considered by too many to be “typical boy will be boy behavior”. It’s not criticized enough. When it is or when it’s actually punished, it’s done with a wink. What’re ya’ gonna’ do, right? They’re boys, hormone-driven, thinking with their little heads, that kind of nonsense. More reinforcement for that behavior. Their abhorrent thoughts and behaviors towards girls go unchecked. Their idea of masculinity – how they’ve constructed it in their mind - is then skewed forever. Gender norms are locked in place. No room for diversity, acceptance, or empathy.

We talked last week in episode 23 about Mean girls and said that boys have their own set of more in your face, physical and verbal aggression towards one another when fighting for position in the group. They’re doing their best to fit in and be accepted. All this is majorly stressful. They’re judging each other and sorting and deciding who the leaders are and who the followers are, and a lot of that misogynistic behavior is seen as clout – it proves your masculine. It proves you’re not gay; another group of people real boys abhor.

The Guardian article quotes Michael Salter, an expert in masculinity as saying about this age, “we see incredibly misogynistic and deeply homophobic cultures emerge and I don’t think these cultures are broken up purely by consent conversations or conversations about healthy relationships.” What happens is the more aggressive boys are harassing or assaulting girls in person, with other, perhaps lesser dominant boys in the group standing there and doing nothing to the girl but also do nothing to help her. They’re just a silent bystander. This happens, just as we talked about in episode 24, because they’re afraid of losing their position in the group. Of being excluded. And possibly with boys, of being physically targeted and bullied. And we know what a strong influence that can be on adolescents. So, these boys, who truly don’t hate the girl or may even be friends with them, will literally do nothing to help her.

And while access to porn in their pocket can’t be the only reason boys act this way because they’ve been doing it for longer than the internet has been around, it certainly doesn’t help. They get these crazy ideas about what sex is supposed to be like. They watch actors or porn stars and are getting this totally unrealistic picture of what sex is all about – before they’ve ever had sex or learned about it factually. And what’s even more disturbing is that much of this pornography emphasizes physical aggression against women.

So, what this all boils down to is that in most societies today, boys, as a group, are generally primed to be at least pushy if not downright aggressive towards women when it comes to sex, by the time they’re ready for sex. Don’t take my word for it, let’s just look at a few statistics.

In America, every 68 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted. Girls from 16 to 19 years old are 4 times more likely than anyone else, to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. 93% of the time, they know their attacker, who 88% of the time, is male. So, as far as this fallacy of “real rape” goes, rape by a stranger that grabs you in the dark; that only happens about 7% of the time.

And it only gets worse when they go to university – college. 1 in 5 will be sexually assaulted (and statistically, we know many of these girls have already been assaulted before they get there), and 85% it’s by someone they know.

As I was doing my research for today’s episode, I ran across a Time magazine article from 2019, written by the author of the novel Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (I hope I’m pronouncing that right). I’ll link to it in the show notes. Anderson’s novel is read in high schools and colleges across the US, often as a jumping off point for conversations about rape myths, consent, and sexual violence. Anderson herself was raped at 13-years-old and in the book, she tells of a teenage girl who was sexually assaulted.

In the Time article she says she’s been speaking at middle and high schools and colleges since the book was first published in 2011. And that without fail, after every speech she gives, there are always girls who come to her afterwards and tell her what’s happened to them. She listens, she finds a trusted adult and they get the support they need. Over the past 20 years, that’s happened thousands of times all across the US. Thousands of victims telling her their story.

But what she said surprised her the most is the boys who also want to talk. A few have been victims of sexual abuse themselves. Others want to talk about a friend (a girl) who’s been raped. He wants to know how to help because she’s in pain. Other boys, who never come right out and confess they’ve actually raped someone, will tell her they “may have gone too far” or that “they were drunk”. She says she knows these boys are confused and ashamed. And when she visits a classroom after her presentations at these schools – for smaller group discussions – she says no matter the demographic, the teenage boys in the class always say the same thing: they don’t believe the main character in the book was actually a victim of rape. She writes, “They argue she drank beer, she danced with her attacker and, therefore, she wanted sex. They see his violence as a reasonable outcome. Many of them have clearly been in the same situation.”

And THAT is why we know we live in a rape culture – why we know our boys don’t really get it and why it’s so very important that they do. It’s the “real rape” myth; that rape is something that happens when a stranger jumps out and grabs a women walking alone in the dark.

She goes on to say that the other main thing she hears from these boys is that they don’t understand why the rape victim is so upset! They say things like, “it was only a couple of minutes and she’s like depressed for a year!” They have absolutely no clue what impact being sexually violated does to the victim. No clue. No empathy whatsoever. Which is not surprising, again, empathy doesn’t come easy for teens in general.

 

A minute ago, we talked about the huge numbers of girls who are sexually assaulted, raped every year, in middle school, high school and college. But how many of them are actually reported to the police?

You might remember this very issue being in the US national spotlight when back in 2018 when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court. Just days after the four-day Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding his nomination, but before they voted on whether to confirm him, it came out that a psychology professor named Christine Blasey Ford, had accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school back in 1982. Another hearing was set for about 3 weeks later to hear testimony from both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh.  And in the meantime, 2 other women publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. But only Blasey Ford testified before the all-male panel at the hearing.

She told of a small gathering one afternoon at a house where she and Kavanaugh, who knew each other, but not well, were both in attendance. She said she’s been haunted by what happened all these years. People were drinking beer – she had one. She said Kavanaugh and his friend Mark were both visibly drunk. At some point she went upstairs to go to the bathroom but at the top of the stairs, she was pushed from behind into a bedroom and turned to see Kavanaugh and Mark come in and lock the door behind them. One of the boys turned up the music that was already playing in the bedroom. She was pushed onto the bed, Kavanaugh got on top of her and as she said, “began running his hands all over her body and grinding into her” She yelled, she tried to get away, but he was too heavy. He groped her, tried to take off her clothes – luckily for her he was both really drunk, and she was wearing a one-piece bathing suit under her clothes. She tried yelling for help, and he put his hand over her moth so tightly she had a hard time breathing and thought he might accidentally kill her. This is what she says has had the biggest impact on her life. She says both of the boys just laughed and seemed to have a great time. The friend jumped on the bed with them a few times and the last time, they toppled off the bed, which is when she made her escape to the bathroom locking the door behind her and waited until they left the house.

And listen to this carefully; she didn’t tell her parents because she was 15, at a party at a house with no parents present and was drinking with boys. She convinced herself to move on because she wasn’t raped. This is why we don’t want to ever let our kids think we will totally freak out on them if they make a mistake.

If you didn’t see this play out on television, where grown men play act for the cameras, you might want to watch these people who run our country in action. One of the senators asked Kavanaugh to swear to God that he didn’t do it, and that was good enough. He denied it all “with great vigor” as they say. And although she has very specific details, had told the story to several people over the years, had literally begged for an FBI investigation and even took a polygraph test which she passed, the men who run our country, didn’t give 2 shits. They profusely and theatrically apologized to Kavanaugh and his family for what they’d been put through. They called it a scandal for the United States, blamed the Democrats (like they made it up and gave her a script?). And they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court of the United States of America. And that’s why it’s called a patriarchy. The way she was treated – true misogyny.

If a college professor of psychology, who grew up in Bethesda Maryland, attended an elite all-girls school, has not a blemish on her record as an upstanding human being, cannot be believed as a witness. If she can’t be believed, what hope do average girls have, what hope do brown and black skinned girls have, what hope do LGBTQA+ people have – who can be believed?

This is a key element of “rape culture”. It’s part of the message that everyone receives loud and clear: If you come forward and claim you were sexually assaulted, you’d better been held at gunpoint, you’d better had broken bones trying to fight him off, you’d better not been drinking, you’d better not have known him, you’d better been wearing an ankle length prairie dress and a chastity belt. Because otherwise – you’re a liar and he did nothing wrong and you’re going to look like a fool and he’s going to look like the victim.

And this “Rape culture” is even more prevalent in middle and high schools than in the general population. Research shows that adolescent girls see sexual harassment and objectification as routine parts of their everyday lives. They’re literally used to being grabbed and groped and touched at school, parties and anywhere else they’re around boys. It’s simply commonplace. I’m going to link to a couple of studies because they’re worth reading to help you spark conversations with your teen – boy or girl either one.

Girls have learned through our culture and their own personal experience that this treatment is simply to be expected. The get the message from popular media, family and friends that make light of these types of interactions. Even the language they use about it trivializes their experiences. And it’s the language that’s been passed down for generations. Basically, that boys will be boys and the narrative that boys and men have such strong sexual urges that they just cannot control themselves. That strong heterosexual drive is just more than they should be expected to handle. Scientific studies show that girls overwhelmingly believe these ideas. They learn early and believe that heterosexual males are expected to be aggressive. It’s our social construct of masculinity. They learn that their own behavior, even just the way they look, can bring out this beast in a boy.

They’ve learned that touching or groping or grinding is literally nothing because it’s not “real rape”. Unless you’re physically forced to have sexual intercourse by a stranger – it’s not sexual violence or sexual assault.

In forensic interviews analyzed in one study, discussing being touched on the breasts, vagina, bottom, girls say things like “He does it to everyone, you know, it just happens sometimes,” or “they’re boys, that’s what they do” and “I mean I never think it’s a big thing because they do it to everyone.” Girls simply normalize all this aggressive sexual behavior.

It’s also clear that girls begin to conflate aggressive sexual behavior with compliments and normal sexual desire involved in dating. They literally view harassment as romance and flirting and “just joking”. This all certainly plays a role in consent. They also talk about having to make all sorts of tactical decisions about male aggressive sexual behavior. Sometimes choosing to ignore it and sometimes trying to avoid it. Boys trying to get them alone, force them into corners or basements or behind buildings. And then when they’re assaulted despite their best efforts, they’re all too often labeled as promiscuous – rumors being spread about them all over school by the offender and even other girls.

On the other hand, it also appears to be a fairly common form of coercion to threaten a girl with rape if they don’t perform other sexual acts. And because girls see “real rape” as much worse, they end up complying. Girls care a great deal about their sexual reputation. And it can be confusing for them because they want to be seen as desirable, but they certainly don’t want to be labeled a “ho” or a “slut”.

And interestingly, these interviews also reveled that girls were quick to critique and question whether other girls, friends, had actually experienced a sexual assault as they’d stated - even though they had themselves just been assaulted, sometimes even by the same person (that’s why they were being interviewed). There seems to be a lot of policing of peer sexual responsibility. There’s enough blame to go around. They blame themselves; they blame each other and of course, the perpetrator blames his masculinity and the girl. Is it any wonder that most of these crimes go unreported? Sexual harassment and sexual assault is seen as just part of being female. It’s been normalized in society.

We’ve made some major advancements since the #metoo movement, but it doesn’t seem to have trickled down to middle and high schools. The old “boys can’t help themselves” line is still going strong there. Then there’s fear of reliving it, of retribution from the perpetrator, of rumors being spread, of not being believed by others, including the police, fear of getting in trouble with parents or just being too ashamed for parents to know.

Girls are also of course, traumatized by sexual assault. Research has shown they’re left feeling completely powerless and vulnerable. They lose trust for people, they fear being stigmatized as a “victim”, and they associate sexual behavior with fear and coercion rather than pleasure or choice. Sexual assault is the most underreported crime for both teens and adults. Of course, it’s hard to get an estimate on something that’s not been reported. But at least one study has shown that at least for girls in college, only 5% reported the incident to police. One can only assume that for teenagers still in middle or high school, the percentage would be even lower. We do know that quite often teens don’t tell anyone for years and sometimes never.

We have to somehow get through to our kids. We have to make sure they know they can talk to us about anything and that we won’t freak out. We have to convince them that sexual harassment and sexual assault is not acceptable - ever. We have to teach our boys empathy and that girls are human and are not just objects to use and abuse for their own pleasure. We have to teach them to treat girls with dignity. We have to teach our girls that they’re worthy of that dignity and empathy and to settle for nothing less. We need to teach them about how to be in a real relationship. And we have to teach them the meaning of consent and how to get it and how to give it.

That’s next week on Speaking of Teens. Join me Tuesday, October 18^th for Part 2 in this series Teenagers, “Rape Culture”, Sexual Assault, and Consent

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com, an organization I started to educate other moms and adolescents about emotional intelligence.

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Enjoy your week and I’ll see you back here next Tuesday for episode 25.