Embarrassingly enough, I refused to dive off the block until I was three summers deep into my local summer swim team. Do not get it twisted — I loved diving. From the side of the pool, I could have spent hours leaping into the water, feeling the rush around me as I torpedoed to the other side. 

At every swim meet I competed in until I learned to dive from the block, I would be the only 12-year-old girl standing in the gutter, waiting for the gun to go off. My mom said she did not know how I was not embarrassed every time I did that and honestly, I do not know either. My childhood brain knew nothing of embarrassment, I guess. 

When I finally learned to dive from the block, I always tried to get as far across the pool as I could without coming up for air. Finally, being able to launch even further through the pool, my dream was to make it to the other side without surfacing. 

I remember watching in awe when the high schoolers competed as a boy on one of the other teams could go all the way up and back 100 meters without taking a single breath in between. It was mesmerizing, watching the water ripple above him as he remained below the surface and I wondered if I could even hold my breath for 30 seconds, much less long enough to get all the way across the pool. 

Now that I have wasted about 68 seconds, it is my duty to inform you someone in the United States has been sexually assaulted in the time it took you to read my childhood anecdote. 

In the United States, 13% of all undergraduate and graduate students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence or incapacitation. For undergraduate students alone, 9.7% of women and 2.5% of men experience sexual assault, according to data from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. If we applied those statistics to the sample of enrollment data from 2022-23 for Shippensburg University, that would be a hypothetical 577 undergraduate students. 

But do you know what I find sicker than just knowing how many people are assaulted? Staring into the faces of the people I know who abused my friends three times a week in classes and watching the abusers live their lives normally after fundamentally altering how another human being will live. 

That is my daily life and I cannot even dream of how frustrating it is for those who have been assaulted to watch their abusers go on like nothing happened. Gun to my head, I can list at least five close friends who have been assaulted and I can also give you the names of their abusers. Not that that matters, because even though each of my friends did file the right paperwork, only one of them has seen their abuser face jail time. 

Another 68 seconds spent reading this and another assault has happened in the United States. 

I have filed Title IX complaints at Shippensburg on behalf of one of my friends. The reward for my work is watching this man win awards, present his thesis and be praised by departments. To be clear, I do not blame the Title IX office for having to see this man still on campus because they did do everything within their abilities. The issue is their abilities. 

What I would give to see each of those accused of sexual assault put on academic probation until the charges are dropped or proven false. What I would give to see these wastes-of-humanity expelled from Shippensburg in their final semester because of the harm they cause others. It is clearly not enough to make freshman watch the “Consent is like Tea” videos during Fall Welcome Week, which is what we got when I started in 2020. 

We might be adults, but we are stubborn and stupid and like kids who will not learn to dive if no one forces us to. I should have been a little embarrassed to not being able to dive after three years of swimming competitively, but those who sexually assault others should be socially outcast for their actions. The only way to do that is for there to be real, consistently enforced and heavily hitting consequences, which is just not the case today. 

If you have the ability to rob another human being of their soul, the ability to hurt someone else for your sole pleasure, the ability to act with blatant disregard for those around you, you do not deserve to exist in this world and yet you do. No matter how much we as humans move toward equity and equality, we still are not leaving the stone age with how little we punish abusers and allow our government to provide more protections to those committing vile acts than compassion for their victims. 

In the time it has taken for you to read this article, at least three people have been sexually assaulted in the United States and this will continue unless we finally start punishing people adequately for their actions.  

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