Dear Next President,

My name is Kaitlyn, I’m in the ninth grade and I would like to address rape consequences. I feel that the punishments for the rapist are not strict enough! Around 97% of rapists walk out with no consequences at all. As a teen in high school, that gives me a little bit of a scare.

The consequences of rape is not a tiny mouse problem but are elephant size of problems. Rape is something 22 million women, and 1.6 million men have to deal with everyday. The victims of rape usually walk away with depression, sleep disorders,eating disorders, and can become mute. The rapists walk off with maybe guilt at the most. Victims live in terror that their rapist is walking around stalking them or another person after they receive no punishment.

An example of this is Maya Angelou, after being raped as a young girl by her mother's boyfriend, she went mute for five years. She felt guilty and withdrew from everyone in her life but her brother. The rapist in the situation escaped jail time and was free to live his life. Another example of a time the rapist walked free was a rape involving Tyler Perry. As a young child he was raped by four different people, his father, and four other adults. He claimed it as a living hell. He also said he felt he died as a child. He recently told the story about the brutal sexual assault for the first time in full detail on Oprah Winfrey's talk show. Maya’s story relates to me because I'm doing Maya for a my hero project in art. She told her story and turned it into poems to release her feelings, she became a social activist and a hero to many. This can show that even after being raped and having suffered with having the rapist walk free, and living her life in fear she got through it no matter how difficult it was.

As previously stated, rape is an elephant issue, every 109 seconds another person has experienced a sexual assault. Rape consequences is a big issue because out of every 100 rapes, only 46 get reported, 12 lead to an arrest, 9 get prosecuted, 5 lead to a felony, 3 will spend even a day in prison and 97 rapists will eventually walk free. With 97 rapists walking free people cant live how they want. I, for one, live everyday a little more fearful knowing 97 rapists are out walking free without any punishments- which isn't necessarily big because I am just one person, but many people can barely leave their house without being harassed by catcalling. Girls are told to walk faster at night and wear more clothes to prevent predators from harassing them instead of addressing the issues with teaching people how to act. We also don’t educate boys that rape is a potential risk for them too.

To fix this problem, we need to start educating more youth, so that everyone has a way to speak up, has more ways to say no and that people will begin to understand what it means when a person says no and doesn’t give consent. Doing so could result in a little less rapings each day, because we are teaching everyone ways to say no, to not be afraid if a situation like this occurs, and we will teach them to speak up to a safe adult right away. By teaching about listening we will teach people what saying no can sound like in many different ways like saying no and giggling does not mean the person is actually saying yes. Another action that could be done is to make the laws stricter. In other countries they castrate the rapist-while this consequence is extreme- we could make a law that all rapists would be chemically castrated for a certain amount of years similar to a probation from jail. Rape is something everyone suffers it not just girls, boys do too, and their family and friends suffer when the victims suffer. There are 97 rapists walking freely right now and every 109 seconds someone gets raped. This is too huge of a number and it needs to be taken care of! Thank you for taking the time to address this issue and I look forward to hearing how you will change the consequences for a rapist.

Sincerely,

Kaitlyn