Dear Mr./ Mrs. President,

As you’re starting your term as our new president, I want you to know that sexual assault is a major issue in the country. I’m looking for you to help change this and make people safe again. In order to do that, high schools and middle schools need to teach students about the risks of sexual assault/ abuse. Learning it in college is too late.

You may or may not know but children that have been sexually abused and/or assaulted later in life think about suicide and may also attempt it. They struggle living with the trauma and coping with it. In fact pubmed.gov says, “Young people who had experienced child sexual abuse had a suicide rate that was 10.7 to 13.0 times the National Australian rates. Thirty-two percent of the abused children had attempted suicide, and 43% had thought about suicide since they were sexually abused.” Imagine a young child in your family struggled with this pain, and one day was ready to end it all. You wouldn’t want that to happen right? So for that reason alone you should find ways to prevent this. Rape education courses are the solution.

There aren’t proper outreach programs and educational courses for teens like they provide in colleges. Colleges do have a very great way of prevention and education that middle and high schools don't. In fact “colleges are encouraging students to act when they see a risky situation unfolding.” US NEWS shows how much colleges have taken this problem and are trying their hardest to fix it. “Elon University in North Carolina, for example, must take a course online before they even reach campus that marches them through the ethics of relationships and alcohol's effect on behavior.” Indiana University even got creative on their strategy. “Orientation at Indiana University includes a musical that covers everything from negative gender stereotypes to what constitutes sexual assault.” This is a good idea in my opinion because it reaches out to different groups in the colleges. All of these great things colleges provide but yet middle schools and high schools still lack the knowledge.

As I have expressed before, the school systems are very inexperienced on the topic. Children that go through traumatic experiences like this feel very alone based on the fact no one knows how to help them properly. The amount of importance in the education topic does vary. “ Sexual assault education for students may be very thorough in one school district, may be extremely comprehensive in one classroom, but be completely nonexistent in another.”  This is a crucial thing and the fact that only some school districts, let alone classrooms within the district, find it important is bad. If you don’t see the importance in the fact that it's “sexual assault”, look at it as it was math or social studies. Would you want your child going to a school that didn’t have the knowledge to teach them on such an important subject as those? I don’t think so. So what's the difference in all reality?  We need to unite as one country and get on top of this and teach the young adults on this important and sad situation that happens to the majority of us. Don’t you find it sad that 80 percent of high school counselors feel unprepared to address incidents of abuse? If a student experiences abuse, they cannot rely on the adults in charge to assist them properly, as the adults do not how to do so, according to breakthecycle.org.

My point in writing this to you is that you as our next president should know about where our country is lacking in important life situations. There are easy ways for you to fix this and make America a little bit better.  Do what’s right and create better educational resources. Don't let down that poor lonely little girl sitting in the back of a classroom thinking about suicide looking for help.

Thank you for your time,

Jada

Suicide risk following child sexual abuse

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11888413

How Colleges Are Battling Sexual Violence

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/28/how-colleges-are-battling-sexual-violence

The Need for Response to Sexual Assault in Middle and High School

http://www.breakthecycle.org/blog/need-response-sexual-assault-middle-and-high-school

Medscape

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/824023