Why Should Men Be Involved?

During our struggle to end sexual violence, often due to time, staffing, and monetary constraints, many of us as advocates have been forced for too long to fail to adequately include the portion of our population that is most often responsible for sexual misconduct. We need desperately to begin collectively and in a comprehensive and strategically manner to act on the knowledge that we live in a society that values male dominance, and that places great emphasis on the importance of the strong and stoic, or macho man. In any other arena, it would make sense to focus on the cause of the problem. However, too few of us dedicated to our cause have created the time, initiative, and funding that is necessary to effect adequate change. It it now time for all of us as advocates, professionals, therapists, friends, and victims to work to address an actionable solution to the problem of sexual violence.

We believe that it is through the education and inclusion of males that this is possible. It should be the goal of all of us to extend our efforts to area and strategies that have been underutilized in the past. Through organized community outreach to males including educational components we can begin to spread the word that sexual violence does indeed wider attention. We can begin to convince those living around us who have not had the unfortunate duty of seeing firsthand the terrible scars that are left by a sexual assault , that sexual violence is indeed an epidemic in the United States that has the potential to directly affect all of our lives.

(Excerpt from PCAR - Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape)