I've been reading TRP for a couple months and this is my first post. I have been in school and working at a university for the past 10 years. Sexual assault is a terrible thing and needs to be taken seriously but the posters on campuses these days are ridiculous.

This exact poster is everywhere in my campus washrooms. I've seen it in some nightclubs too: http://assets.feministing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/edmonton.jpg

It makes me chuckle because this poster serves little to no educational purpose. I am confident that men know it's wrong to pull a drunk girl into a bathroom stall and forcibly double team her against her will.

However, the posters we do encounter are pointless and actually socially damaging because they portray men as villainous animals. What makes me sad is that no-one speaks up about the shameless stereotyping in these awareness campaigns. If someone made a "beware of theft" poster that shows a picture of a black dude robbing a white girl people would lose their shit.

Even if the goal is to only target men, it would be much more educational/realistic if it depicted a couple having normal sex with alcohol on the side and an explicitly message that this would not be legally considered consensual sex. I can't help but feel that these awareness campaigns are more interested in creating a narrative then preventing rape.

I recently saw a poster that had a pie chart stating "Did you know 20% of women are sexually assaulted at some point in their college career". These are official posters from our university's crisis center that are there to raise awareness.

These figures come from dubious college surveys that have sampling biases (mass email recruitment, etc) and use a nonspecific method for defining sexual assault. They often include sexual harassment in the survey (which means any kind of unwanted sexual advance) to create a combined sexual assault/harassment figure. The problems occur when these figures are then misquoted as being representative of "rape" rather than "rape and sexual harassment".

TLDR: Sexual assault is serious and I am not against educating both sexes about what legal consensual sex entails. However, the awareness campaigns on campuses these days are misguided and only perpetuate sexist stereotypes without actually raising any meaningful awareness.

P.S. I was wondering if anyone here could point me to an actual reliable source for rape statistics (hopefully from the scientific literature) for my own curiosity.