By Katrina Custardo
Bordering Syria and Israel is a small country by the name of Lebanon. For a size reference, Lebanon is about one-third of the state of Maryland and has the population of a little over 6 million, as of July 2016. Lebanon is not often in the news; recently, however, Lebanese women have captured world attention with their public-art protest. Hanging on a beachfront are 31 dirty wedding dresses strangled by nooses. It paints a striking picture to bring attention to Article 522, a Lebanese law dating from the 1940s that says rapists can escape punishment if they marry the victim.
This isn’t the first public protest of Article 522. The last one happened this past December and featured “bloody brides.” Women were dressed in wedding dresses covered in blood, symbolizing that a wedding cannot cover up violence. That protest succeeded in getting the attention of a Lebanese parliamentary committee, which voted to get rid of the article. On May 15, the Lebanese Parliament will decide if the law should be abolished or not.
America doesn’t have a law like Article 522. Thankfully, we have marital-rape laws that state that it is illegal to rape your spouse and that marriage does not give unlimited consent. However, even with this law, we have had our share of problems with sexual assault, in which some have responded with their own public-art protest. For example, in 2014, Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student, after being raped on the first night of sophomore year, decided to carry a mattress around Columbia in protest of how the school treated her case. She went on to graduate in 2015, still carrying her mattress.
The problem doesn’t seem to be getting better, especially on campuses. Take the Stanford rape case last year. Brock Turner raped a woman who was intoxicated and could not consent. The U.S. Code of Rape and Sexual Assault defines sexual assault, among other definitions, as “any person subject to this chapter who commits a sexual act upon another person when the person knows or reasonably should know that the other person is asleep, unconscious, or otherwise unaware that the sexual act is occurring; or commits a sexual act upon another person when the other person is incapable of consenting to the sexual act.”
Turner only got three months as a “punishment,” which means the survivor has to live with knowing her rapist roams the streets as a free man. And she isn’t the only one who has to live with that knowledge. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the nation’s largest anti-sexual-violence organization, only six out of 1,000 rapists will be incarcerated. This is where America’s sexual assault and rape problems lie.
Sexual assault and rape exist as problems beyond country borders. It is a plague across the world that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Often, it’s shrouded by old-fashioned laws and unfair justice systems. It is only with big cases that grab national headlines, such as the Stanford case, or disturbing visual representations, such as the hanging wedding dresses, that truly get noticed and make people start talking about these important issues. From the smallest college campus to one as big as the University of Iowa, from a nation smaller than Maryland to the strongest nation on Earth, survivors of sexual assault and rape deserve recognition.