“I want to be extremely clear about a single fact: rape is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it has become all but the face of it. I am talking about the most egregious forms of personal, emotional, ideological, physical and spiritual violation imaginable. It doesn’t have to be sexual, either, because the forcible violation of our bodies, minds and spirits is the stock in trade of much of what our mutual effort — and, apparently our agreements — establish not only as normative but desirable.

Egregious and malevolent violations of personhood, sexual and otherwise, happen in every aspect of our modern lives. What we see more openly rampant in ‘underdeveloped’ countries or places is simply the unmasked version of what is happening in silence all around us, every day, without so much as our comment, let alone our intervention.

Something has gone horribly wrong at the very roots of human relation, and it is time for us to wake up and establish a culture that is too human, too humane, and too aware to produce this toxic behavioral force as its cruel side effect. This is a signal whose siren of lost lives must end with our generation. We must answer, and the answer must be universal.”

— an anonymous informant