If you kill a person, you're a murderer. If you steal, no one would hesitate to call you a thief. But in America, when you force yourself on someone sexually, some people will jump through flaming hoops not to call you a rapist.



As reported by Al Jazeera America, colleges across the country are replacing the word "rape" in their sexual assault policies with "non-consensual sex" because schools don't want label students "rapists".

Brett Sokolow of the National Center for Higher Education Risk – the consultant and lawyer behind this reprehensible shift – says that hearing boards are "squeamish" about hearing or using the word, even for students actually found guilty of raping their classmates.

They're not alone. Artist and Vice co-host David Choe described sexually assaulting a massage therapist but would only go so far as calling it "rape-y" and eventually denied it happened at all. Game of Thrones director Alex Graves gave an interview just this week in which he described a what was clearly a rape scene on Sunday night's episode as "consensual."



How can we stop rape if we're not even willing to call it what it is?



Alexandra Brodsky, founding co-director of Know Your IX – an organization that helps students battle sexual assault using Title IX, the federal law which prohibits gender discrimination in education – says that using "sanitized language" demonstrates how colleges think about rape as more of a PR than justice problem.

"It also contributes to the idea that 'real' rape doesn't happen on campuses," she told me.

The problem here is not just colleges that are shying away from the proper label for sexual assault. In 2007, a Nebraska judge banned a woman and her lawyers from using the words "rape", "victim" and "sexual assault" in a rape trial because he didn't want to "prejudice the jury". The only word the woman was allowed to use: "sex".

Similar mischaracterizations happen in the media, where headlines often describe an alleged rapist as facing charges for "having sex" with a child or unconscious person – as if either situation could be anything but rape.

"Sex" isn't nonconsensual. Only rape is. Conflating the two gives credence to the myth that rape is just a particular shade of sex, rather than a violent crime.

This is why some people can't even identify rape when it's right in front of their faces. For instance, one witness in the widely-publicized Steubenville rape case actually walked in on the unconscious victim being assaulted. When asked why he didn't stop the attack, he responded that "It wasn't violent ... I thought [rape] was forcing yourself on someone." In a 2004 California trial resulted in a hung jury after a teen girl was gang-raped on video – she was passed out and penetrated vaginally and anally with pool sticks, a Snapple bottle and a lit cigarette. The defense argued the victim – who at one point urinated on herself during the attack – was a willing participant who wanted to make a porn video. Last year, when talking about the infamous R Kelly tape for which the singer was indicted on child pornography charges, the music critic Jim DeRogatis declared, "It's a rape that you're watching." (Kelly was acquitted on even the charges he did face.)

Part of the problem is that America has never had a clear, accepted cultural definition of what rape is. Even legal definitions have been confusing – it took until 2013 for the FBI to change its 1929 definition of rape from "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will" to the new version: "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

That's why we have politicians like Todd Akin spouting off about "legitimate rape", anti-feminists like Laura Sessions Stepp making up terms like "gray rape" and even Whoopi Goldberg trying (and failing) to explain the difference between "rape" and "rape-rape". The people who sit on juries, sadly, are no different.

But the real reason Americans need these qualifiers - why saying "rape" sometimes and for some people feels like a step too far – is that we're simply more willing to believe perpetrators than victims. If that is to change, we need to call rape what it is, and not water it down with descriptors or replace it with inaccurate terms that make sexual violence and the people who perpetrate it seem more palatable.