Hundreds of students march in a candlelight vigil, from Loyola to Tulane, shouting into the night; letting rapists know that they won’t tolerate it anymore. The problem, however, is that the rapists aren’t lurking just outside the candlelight; they are holding the candles.

One in four college women will be sexually assaulted on a college campus. This statistic persists after 30 years of effort by programs such as Take Back the Night.

More statistics show that 84 percent of women who were raped knew their assailant and 57 percent occurred on a date.

We have shed light on the problem, and it has not gone away. What then can account for this?

Read that statistic again. 84 percent of women who were raped knew their assailant, 57 percent of rapes occurred on a date. The majority of the problem is not the sordid streets of New Orleans.

That means that students, more specifically male students, are responsible for a majority of these crimes. This is frankly, unacceptable. We as Loyola students are a part of a community. We have to protect our community, not destroy it from the inside.

The men of Loyola’s campus need to step up. This is not about understanding the importance of consent in order to protect yourself from rape charges and convictions; this is about having respect for women as human beings. If there were a culture of respect for women among men, rather than a culture of objectification, rape would not be the problem it is today.

This is about being proactive in everyday life, working to change this culture of objectification and denigration. This is about protecting women from you, from your friends and the culture you breed. New Orleans is not always the most wholesome place, and if we, the students, are contributing to the problem, there is no amount of marching and shouting that will solve the problem. Step up men of Loyola. There is a problem here and you are the ones that need to fix it.

Men need to respect the women of Loyola more, understand the importance of consent and should stay vigilant when they see members of their community being compromised on or off campus.