What We Talk About When We Talk to Our Sons About Rape

It’s time to change the conversation.

I don’t have kids yet. But some days, when I’m letting my mind wander through my imagined future, I picture them. They’re mostly just a blur of giggles and tantrums and dripping noses. Sometimes, though, I think about all the worrying a mother does. The worrying an American mother of daughters HAS to do, knowing that she’s raising girls in a country where 1 out of every 6 women is the victim of an attempted or completed rape.

Then I’ll think about what I’ll say to them. I plan the exact words I’ll use when I teach my future daughters how not to be raped. ‘Don’t ever get too drunk or walk alone at night or wear tight skirts. Don’t go back to his room after a first date. Don’t trust any men until they prove to you that they will treat you with respect, that they will stop when you tell them to, and that they won’t plow right through your protests to take what they want from your body. Because, after all, you never know.”

But I need to stop thinking like this. We all need to stop thinking like this. We need to stop trying to prevent rape by shutting women up in a box and building insurmountable walls around them. Of course, we should always teach our children how to stay safe: don’t talk to strangers and all of that. But, when it comes to rape, we need to stop teaching our daughters how not to be victims and start teaching our sons how not to be rapists.

That sounds absurd, I know. Rapists are so often thought of as shady men who hide in dark alleys and pounce on strange women. Our sons would never do something so criminally disturbed! But every 2 minutes, another American is sexually assaulted. Two thirds of these assaults are committed by someone known to the victim. It’s not uncommon for that person to be a date, or even a boyfriend. So, no, I’m not saying that I worry about our sons becoming the man in a ski mask who lurks in parking garages late at night. But it is completely possible that they could become date rapists.

Our sons need to learn control, even when their sexual desire drives them to the most animalistic side of their humanity. I remember when, about a year ago, the famous Reddit rape thread started. In it a redditor asked for the stories of people who had sexually assaulted someone, asked them to share their motivations and regrets. I read this entire thread, which was horrifying for a lot of reasons. But what really struck me were the men who had stopped mid-assault. Why had they stopped? Because they finally took a second, just one moment away from themselves, to look into the faces of their victims. And when they saw the fear and pain there, they stopped.

We need to tell our sons about that. We need to teach them about respect and desire, how to understand that a woman is more than just a conquest, more than the sum of her parts placed tantalizingly under a dress. They need to learn the same self-control, the same slow climb away from satisfaction that women are all forced to learn early on by a misfortune of anatomy and the incompetence of more disappointing partners. And, above all, they need to know that women are human beings who have a right to change their minds, even at the last second, even if they’ve been promising for days and weeks and months that tonight is the night. These lessons are more important than I can say. Because if our sons can learn these lessons, really learn them, then maybe our daughters can finally be safe.

This essay originally appeared on Rewards for Mom on January 7th, 2014.