When I finished applying to colleges, I didn’t sit down for a celebratory ice cream or dinner with my family. There was no talk about which college was my number one, or which ones we could afford.

No, the first thing we talked about was college parties:

“Don’t take drinks from strangers or open containers, don’t drink too much, watch the way you dress, watch who you talk to, where you stand,” are the consistently repeated “don’ts” a woman might hear before going to college, and the warnings of worried parents have one underlying and implied message: don’t get raped.

I’ve always been dumbfounded by these warnings, and when my mother brought it up to me, I was no less confused. Obviously it’s smart to be safe at college, but I’ve always wondered why the priority is to teach people how not to get assaulted, rather than teaching people not to assault others.

Instead of handing out outdated and overdone warnings about rape that typically fall on deaf ears, why not hold a class for all high school seniors or incoming college freshman, regardless of gender, to teach a simple concept: anything but yes means no.

Why not attempt to teach people empathy for others and get them to realize that their actions will have a consequence—causing someone a life-long trauma.

But, that’s just a consequence of the American rape culture we live in. And it’s something that needs to change.

When one out of every five women in America reports being sexually assaulted, 68-percent of rapes go unreported and a recent study published in “Violence and Gender” showed that 31.7-percent of men would force women into sex in a “consequence free environment,” everyone must realize that there is a problem, and that something needs to change.

Where is the empathy between human beings? Why is legal ramification the only thing holding people back from violence? Why is there no emotional realization that assault would hurt a fellow human—someone with feelings, someone with humanity who would be incredibly affected by such an assault?

The first thing that will need to change in order for a crime like rape to be treated seriously will be its perception among the public. Currently, we exist in an environment where a crime like rape is perceived completely differently compared to crimes like murder or assault: when the issue of rape comes up, the victim tends to be blamed and seen as the problem, more than the actual assailant—who is often never found. About 98-percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail or prison.

It’s this process of “victim blaming” that creates the entire problematic rape culture that exists in America. When the first questions by the public are “what were you wearing? What were you doing?” upon hearing about an assault, it places the culpability on the victim and makes it seem like it was their fault that someone else decided to assault them.

The recent rape allegations at the University of Virginia (UVA) are a perfect example of the way that Americans are quick to turn on victims of rape, and turn someone from a victim to a liar in a matter of minutes.

But, what happened at UVA didn’t show that the alleged victim was a liar—it was just the result of faulty reporting, not the result of a faulty source. And now, the victim at UVA will forever be remembered as a liar because she trusted the wrong person with a story, and was transformed from a victim to a vilified monster in a matter of moments, and attacked by those that she had entrusted with her story.

When we continuously choose to treat the victim as a criminal, we scare off future generations from reporting sexual assault and being sympathetic with the fact that it’s wrong, thusly driving us deeper into a culture that treats rape as a part of the norm and tolerates a horrible crime.

Without substantial change to the American mindset that continues to passively dismiss sexual assault as a serious crime and place more blame on the victim than the rapist, we’ll continue to dig ourselves into a deeper and darker hole until rape is treated like nothing. We’re headed in that direction.

Classes are already being implemented earlier and earlier in an attempt to teach compassion and understanding about sexual assault, rather than just warning about the consequences—and they’re having an impact.

Many colleges now require sexual assault safety courses in order to avoid sexual violence on campus, and groups like the CDC offer grants to states that implement a rape prevention course among adolescents that looks to change culturally founded social norms through fact-based curriculum given developmentally throughout a lifetime, which is much more likely to prevent sexual violence across a lifetime, rather than a one-time intervention.

Hopefully, when my kids are on the way to college, I won’t need to feed them warnings about being assaulted, because an entire national mindset will be changed and sexual assault will be treated the same as other heinous crimes—instead of regarded as something that happens to someone who deserved it.