Men, We Need to Talk About "Rape Academy"

This isn’t about women. This is about us. And it’s long past time we had this conversation

Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault, rape, and systemic abuse. Please read at your own discretion.

This article is not for women.

Women already know everything I’m about to say. They navigate it every single day—calculating risks, adjusting routes, reading rooms, and making hundreds of small decisions designed to keep themselves safe from us.

This is for men. Specifically, it is for the men who need to hear this, process it, and do something about it. So if you’re a man reading this—good. Stay with me. Because we need to talk. Let’s Address This.

Protesters rally at a news conference calling for Congress to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files, outside the U.S. Capitol (Kevin Wolf/The Associated Press).

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This, a paywall-free platform dedicated to human rights, social justice, and the facts that corporate media ignores. If able, you can support this work with a paid subscription. 50% off for a limited time.

The Pattern You Cannot Look Away From

Let me give you a series of recent news items. I want you to read them not as isolated incidents, but as the pattern of systemic behavior it is:

• This week, Former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Justin Fairfax killed his wife Cerina Fairfax—then killed himself.

• Last week Nancy Metayer, a woman and inspiring community leader on the verge of announcing her congressional campaign in Florida, was murdered by her husband. He is currently in custody.

• This week former California congressman Eric Swalwell, a former presidential candidate, was forced to resign after it was revealed that four to five women had allegedly been raped and sexually assaulted by him.

• Recently Former Texas congressman Tony Gonzales used his institutional power to coerce an affair with a staffer. She died by suicide—by setting herself on fire.

• The Epstein files document countless cases of rich and powerful men abusing children, raping women, and facing virtually no accountability. Donald Trump himself appears in those files more than one million times. Members of Congress who feign outrage have meanwhile expressed willingness to confirm men nominated by Trump, despite their own extensive appearance in the Epstein Files.

• And now this week we learn about the existence of “Rape Academy.” More on this below.

Rape Academy is the nickname given to a website that accumulated more than 60 million hits in February and more than 80 million hits in March—the majority from men in the United States. According to the CNN expose, Rape Academy exists for one explicit purpose: to teach men how to drug and rape their wives and partners, prostitute them to other men for money, and broadcast it online for the world to see, also for money.

Read that again. 140 million hits in just two months.

This is not a collection of unrelated bad actors. This is a pattern. And the pattern has a name: systemic male violence.

The Part Where Some Men Get Defensive

I already know what a segment of men reading this are going to say: “I’ve never done anything like that”.

Let me be direct: you do not get a cookie for not being a rapist.

That is not an accomplishment or something to hold up as a shield against this conversation. Basic human decency is the floor—the absolute minimum—not a ceiling. And the men who rush to announce their non-rapist status the moment this conversation begins are doing exactly what this culture has trained them to do: center themselves instead of confronting the problem.

The problem is this: we live in a society where one in three women, at minimum, report experiencing sexual assault or rape at some point in their lives. Men are committing those assaults. We live in a society where according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 98% of men who commit rape will never spend a single day in prison. This is no accident. Our criminal justice system was built by men, is run predominantly by men, and has been structured, whether consciously or not, to protect other men from accountability.

rainn.org/get-informed/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/

The Men Who Watch and Say Nothing

There is a category of man I want to speak to directly: the ones who watch.

The friend who knows. The colleague who suspects. The family member who looks away. The man who tells himself it’s not my business or I don’t really know what happened or I don’t want to get involved—while a woman in his orbit is being harmed by a man he calls a friend, a brother, a teammate, a colleague.

It is your problem.

The culture of male violence does not survive without the culture of male silence. Every man who watches and says nothing is not a neutral bystander—he is an active enabler of a system that protects predators at the expense of survivors.

What Men Have Said to Me for Saying This

Once I learned of the horrific “Rape Academy” website, I posted this video—it went viral.

I want to share specific examples of men who have responded to this message with mockery, insecurity, personal attacks, and deflection rather than engaging with the substance or holding other men accountable.

First, the men who falsely alleged my comments call all men rapists by default (they do not). This comment is what insecurity looks like.

Next, the men who call it “paid propaganda” to condemn rape culture. (It is not).

And let’s not forget about the men who think it’s misinformation, clickbait, or a distraction to call out rape culture (it is not, in any way).

And these are but a snapshot of the hundreds of angry, insecure, and in some cases violent responses men sent me for my ‘crime’ of condemning systemic male violence and abuse of women. Still talking to the men reading this—given these are the responses I received from one post about abusive men—imagine what women must navigate every single moment of their lives?

It is horrific, unsustainable, and inexcusable.

I share these not to relitigate those exchanges, but to illustrate the precise problem. When a man responds to a conversation about male violence with ridicule, personal attacks, and defensiveness—rather than with reflection or accountability—he is only further demonstrating exactly what I’m describing. The instinct to protect male ego above all else, even when the cost of that ego protection is the safety and lives of women, is itself a symptom of the sickness I’m naming.

These men are not outliers. And that is the crisis.

My Message to Women

I say this with full awareness of how uncomfortable it makes men: most men are not safe to be around alone.

Not because every man is a predator. But because a woman who does not know a man has no reliable way to determine whether he is one—and the statistical and cultural evidence does not give her reason for default trust. I know I am safe to be around. The women who don’t know me cannot know that. And I refuse to place the burden of that discernment on them.

And to those who would assert that more women should obtain firearms—the FBI data horrifyingly confirms that when a firearm is present, women are 100x more likely to die by that gun than to defend themselves with that gun. The “Rape Academy” story proves once more that if women cannot trust even their husbands, how are they to trust random men in public? Women have been carrying that infinite burden for their entire existence. They have been told to dress differently, walk differently, drink differently, trust differently—as if the solution to male violence is female vigilance.

It is not.

The solution to male violence is male accountability.

This Is Not Sustainable

I close with something that should matter even to the men who cruelly do not care about women’s safety as a moral proposition: this is destroying our society.

A civilization in which one in three women (at minimum) are sexually assaulted, in which 98% of rapists face no consequences, in which a website teaching men to drug and rape their partners accumulates hundreds of millions of visits, in which powerful men kill their wives and abuse children and face no accountability—is a civilization in collapse. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Societies that normalize the systematic abuse and dehumanization of any minority community do not survive. But what’s happening here goes beyond a minority community, as women are the majority of society. Thus, societies that normalize the dehumanization of the majority of society ensure their own violent collapse. And that is what this society is facing if men do not change.

We are at an inflection point. And the path forward requires men—not governments, not policies alone, not women doing yet more emotional labor—but men to do the work. Get therapy. Do the internal work to understand where your rage, your entitlement, and your defensiveness come from. Hold your friends accountable—not just the strangers in the headlines, but the men in your actual life. Refuse to be silent when you know something is wrong. Refuse to prioritize male camaraderie over female safety.

This is not a political position. It is a human one.

Men, we are capable of better. The question is whether we will choose it—or whether we will continue to watch the consequences of our collective failure accumulate until there is nothing left to salvage.

The time for half-measures and defensive deflection is over.

Fix yourself. Hold each other accountable. Or own the consequences of refusing to.

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Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the justice that our society demands. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.