What is almost impossible for some people to contemplate is that there are human cultures where rape is virtually unknown. Societies where women don’t calibrate themselves, for their entire lives, to its threat. More than 40 years ago, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted an extensive cross-cultural study of rape involving more than 150 human societies around the word. She found that 47% of societies she studied had no rape, 36% had some incidence of rape, and 17%, of which we are one, were definitively rape prone.

What marked cultures where rape was missing were that women had authority in the community that was not related to reproduction — they were political or religious leaders and made valued economic contributions to society; feminine qualities were valued by communities; the relationships between men and women was not defined as hierarchical; boys were taught to respect girls and women (something altogether different from learning to protect them); these societies were stable and peaceful, making reliance on brute male physical dominance less likely; divinities were not uniquely male; and, lastly, these cultures had great respect for their environments and did not destructively exploit them.

On the other hand, rape-prone societies like ours are those which tolerate, encourage and often glorify violence as a marker of masculinity starting in early childhood. Boys learn that to be men meant being aggressive, competitive and dominant; work and access to authority are more rigidly sex segregated; women have minimal, if any authoritative roles in public or religious life or sports; femininity and feminine qualities are considered inferior and routinely mocked; “women’s work” is undervalued and considered demeaning to men; and, women’s roles were largely restricted to reproductive ones, their reproduction more likely to be regulated by men.

More: Our ‘Rape Problem’ Can’t Be Solved By Colleges | Soraya Chemaly