Today I guest lectured in one of my professor's classes. I talked about a few communication theories that operate in health promotion campaigns and then at the end did a discussion with the students about ethics in health campaigns. One of the ethics topics was unintentional stigmatizing of certain groups/people. I showed them an example where the focus of the ad was to get young people to stop binge drinking. The ad follows a young girl getting drunk, sleeping with a guy who appears to be her boyfriend and then he leaves her naked and alone in one of the rooms of the house and then the ad basically alludes to her getting raped. At the very end the narrator says something like "Binge drinking has consequences, are you ready for yours?" The ad is just disguising to me because it's very obviously placing blame on the rape victim because she drank too much. I showed it to a few people before the class just to make sure I wasn't reading too much into it and it was as obvious as I thought it was and they were just as appalled by the ad as I was.
Not only did my students not at all get that the ad was blaming the victim. But they also blamed the victim and said well it's mostly her fault for getting so drunk, she didn't have to drink! Basically they said all the things you should never say or even think if someone was raped. The only thing that upset them about the ad was that it showed college students binge drinking and not all college students binge drink so it stigmatizing college student.
So I had to explain to COLLEGE students that rape is NEVER the victims fault no matter what they are wearing, or drinking, or doing.
I'm pretty sure this was my face in class:
But in my head my reaction was:
