When something so unbearably wrong like the March 16 allegations of rape happens, the whole community is visibly shook and looks back to re evaluate the safety standards or lack thereof, which allowed the incident to occur.

This is a perfectly reasonably response to quite frankly a traumatic and utterly horrendous situation.

In a time like this it may feel like there are no words to justly articulate the horror. Those bitter, lingering questions remain examining, “How could this have been prevented? How exactly did it happen? Is there a possibility that something like this could happen to my child? Am I safe in school?”

Right in the same line of thought is the gnawing question which inevitably pops up:

“Who’s at fault?”

While it may seem easy to instinctively blame the school, because they are responsible for the safety of all student sat school, ultimately the people at fault are those who committed the crime. They are autonomously responsible for their own actions and should be treated as such, according to the law.

It is important that we regard the perpetrators of the crime as individually responsible on their own consciencesa��, because each of them made a string of undeniable wrong decisions, and they are not intrinsically bad people because of their backgrounds, races or immigration statuses, but because of the crimes that they have committed, which as individuals, they must be one hundred percent accountable too.

As a matter of school safely, RHS is honestly not so much more unsafe as some Twitter reporters would like to claim that it is. Yes, a horrible thing happened here, but quite frankly horrible things can happen anywhere. While the victim is by no means to blame for the crime committed against her, other students can look to what happened and act in ways educate themselves about rape culture, so that hopefully the risk of something like this occurring can be mitigated in the future.

Going forward, RHS students and staff are just undergoing the process of healing from what has happened, with new regulations and policies. For some students it feels like the new policies really do not make a difference to change much, but it is understandable that the school would feel the need to tighten up their practices. However, those exploiting the situation at hand for their own political agendas is just wrong.

It takes a lot of courage to tell someone that you have been a victim of sexual assault, something that has the ability to scar someone for the rest of their lives, even more so when there are people in society who feel the need to take advantage of the situation. It is simply disgusting that some people think it is OK to just bypass the the victim who had to go through the trauma, to make a statement.

But honestly, if concerned parents want to make the schools and society in general a safer place, then they need to look to stand up against rape culture and teach their children responsible and respectful ways of acting, which can provide for more change than simply unconstructively taking to social media to blame the institutions involved.

If there is one takeaway from this, should be the importance of respect. Victims may be going through any number of emotions and no one should be forcing their morphed idea of what happened on someone who actually lived it. Above all, no means no: learn it, live it, love it.