Gender Violence as “Rumor” – by Bryant CroSs

With that said…

I was walking through the Student Center a few days ago and found myself in a conversation about a woman who was jumped at the Sigma house by 8 men during the Sigma weekend. One of these men are rumored to be affiliated in some way with Essence modeling. One of the people in that conversation confirmed the incident based on the fact that “the woman is in my class”. Because I innately placed it as a “rumor” in my mind, I left it alone. Yet, the same rumor popped up tonight while I was in PMM (Progressive Masculinity Mentors) as another brotha stated he heard the same thing. Now usually, ‘rumor’ was the category I was still going to place this under until I had a ‘moment’ where I realized my patriarchal (male-dominated) thinking.

Why do I so easily dismiss this as ‘rumor’ meaning [possibly not true]? You see, something tells me deep in my soul (women would call this intuition when they know a man is lying or that something just isn’t right) that this really happened. That somewhere on this campus is a woman who was jumped, i.e, hit, beaten, and attacked by 8 men and is sitting in the realm of silence with other women who are attacked but never report it. This reality is still true when my own sister, a junior on this campus, was attacked and it took me a week of talking with her to say something about it. It is true in the phone call I received 2 weeks ago from a friend in St. Louis, whom after a party at her house a guy attempted to rape her (thankfully a friend forgot something and came back to the house which interrupted his attempt). To this day, she has not reported the crime. This reality is true when my cousin, a freshman on this campus, told me of her friend (also a freshman) who was beaten and is currently stalked by a man who doesn’t even attend this university (I will not release names for safety reasons).

Fact is, this ‘rumor’ category I easily placed this situation RARELY happens when the person that gets jumped is a male. We (as men) will comment, give critique, and analyze every swing, punch, and blow as if we were Charles Barkley commentating on the latest NBA game in every barbershop in town. We will rarely talk about such violence towards a man as if [it possibly never happened].

What about the ‘blame the victim’ routine? Yea, we saw that blame system happen in the Rihanna & Chris Brown case as we justified Chris while demonizing Rihanna under the idea that “She gave him herpes” or “She was acting crazy first” or “She must’ve done something to him”…all conversations I’ve been in with multiple people. I bet the woman who was jumped by 8 men somehow “invited” such a thing. Matter of fact, that is what one of the people in the group conversation stated. According to one member of the conversation she was trying to protect her cousin. Once this was stated, EVERYONE in the group smacked their lips with a sense of “Ahhh”. A sort of relief that we can excuse this violence as another “crazy black woman who should have never….” Fill in the blank.

Violence towards women has always been (1) excused or (2) never talked about at all. There is something in my male body that innately placed this under the ‘rumor’ category. As something meaning not true, and if it did happen, she must’ve invited it which leaves the blame on her. We as men need to check how our male privilege silence women and perpetuates violence towards them. We need to uphold the standard taught by our mothers, grandmothers, elders, etc., that FOR NO REASON should a man (or in this case, 8 men) put their hands on a woman and that the consequences for men who are violent towards women should be just as severe as any other crime enacted towards men (for a man would still get more time car-jacking then domestic or sexual violence. Something is off with that picture). Whoever this sister is, I hope she speaks up despite a patriarchal, white supremacist, male dominated society that tells her to stay quiet because she probably asked for it anyways. I hope we will speak about these incidents of violence towards women and realize that they are happening on campus on a HUGE scale…unless we still believe these are all just ‘rumors’.

Share on Facebook