If you kill someone by accident – by driving distracted, by using improper building materials, by not monitoring food safety in a restaurant, etc – you’ve still killed them. They’re still dead. And you still go to court, because you killed them. You cut corners, you didn’t follow the rules, you didn’t pay attention. You certainly didn’t mean to kill anyone – your intent was to check that text, or save money on construction, or save time by skipping steps – but you killed them. It happened. You’re not a murderer – but they’re dead. It’s negligent manslaughter, or whatever the courts want to call it.

Why don’t we look at sexual assault the same way?

Not everyone who sexually assaults someone else is a sexual predator. We know that. We all know that. Sometimes sexual assault happens by accident – because someone was distracted, or tried to skip steps, or to get a specific result without checking in. It certainly wasn’t on purpose, and maybe that person is horrified by what they’ve done, because it was an accident! It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t a deliberate power play, it wasn’t on purpose. But their partner has still been sexually assaulted. And it *is* their fault. They sexually assaulted someone by accident. It happened. They’re not a predator, but their partner has been assaulted, or raped, or harassed.

We can see the nuance. We know that there are shades of grey in motivation or cause of sexual assault. But that doesn’t make a person less assaulted, or raped, or harassed. And the person who did it can’t say that it’s not their fault, because they got distracted, or skipped steps, or cut corners. They didn’t look for consent, they didn’t ask their partner about needs or wants, they didn’t look at all of the variables that a person needs to look at in order to get real consent. It’s negligent rape, or negligent assault, and it happened.

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