Recently, there was a reported sexual assault on San Diego Mesa College’s campus. Now sadly, we normally hear of these things in the news.

But when an incident like this took place on a we normally spend five out of seven days of the week at, it hurt a little more to hear. We understand the importance of being self aware of your surroundings and taking the preventative measures that you can when in a given situation, but we believe it’s important to look into the root and source of the problem and try to fix things there.

In a perfect world, that would happen. We should at least do our part and try our best to  just teach people not to rape or sexually assault anyone against their will, and this goes for both men and women. As we all know, women are the majority of sexual assault victims so a lot of the talk is around them, often forgetting that men do get sexually assaulted as well. For the most part, men don’t text each other making sure they got home safe or look after each other when they’re walking to their cars at night. It all just comes down to inarguable human nature.

We should start teaching from a younger age that no means no. A quote on the explore page on Instagram was interesting and caught our eye. It was a counter-argument to the common argument of “well she was dressed a certain way so she was asking for it.” The quote read, “I’m going to start tackling guys wearing football jerseys and say, look how he’s dressed, he’s asking for it.” This comparison seems particularly apt because it really puts into perspective how silly that argument is. Regardless of the situation, we should take further measures to address this serious issue, especially across college campuses. It’s not about how you’re dressed or if you’re on your phone not paying attention, there is no excuse or invitation to be violated.