Uncle Joe may no longer be our vice president, but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing his very public role in the movement to end sexual violence. In a recent interview with Teen Vogue, Biden talked about the campaign he started with former President Obama, “It’s On Us,” which focuses on bystanders’ roles in ending (or perpetuating) sexual violence.
Biden usually does not hold back when talking about sexual violence and rape culture and in this Teen Vogue interview, he did not disappoint. He dropped some simple but powerful truths when discussing the vital role bystanders play in the fight against rape culture. He states (emphasis mine):
[B]ystanders who see something happen, in my view, if they don't holler, scream, pick up the phone and call and intervene, they are complicitous in the commission of a crime. They are complicitous.
Look, if you see a brother taking a drunk freshman coed up the stairs to his room and you do nothing, you're a coward. You are a coward. You have an obligation to step up. You know that she's not able to give consent. And so, I went on campuses, we put together this program, and more than 400,000 people have signed the pledge to intervene. That's how you change attitudes — get a critical mass of people beginning to speak out so that the attacker or the bystander is the pariah, not the woman being assaulted, whether she's drunk or sober.
The It’s On Us campaign is unique because it doesn’t place survivors (or potential survivors) as the keys to ending sexual violence; telling people to not get raped just doesn’t do the job. What the campaign does is hold everyone else in the community responsible. Sexual violence isn’t a “private” issue—it’s something we all have to address together. If we keep failing to hold assailants accountable and intervening when we see a predator in action, we’re no better than Fox News who spent millions to silence survivors and protect a serial predator like Bill O’Reilly.