The bell for first period rings. Students flood the halls walking in tandem with their peers. Teachers stand watch outside their room for the first crop of students to fill their class.

A high school girl walks down the linoleum hallway adjusting her skirt, fixing her hair, assuring herself that her shirt is tucked-in properly. A holiday gift-card well spent, she smiles to herself, dressed in her knee-high brown riding boots, short high-waisted skirt, and crop top.

By now every desk is filled except one. She enters the room and all eyes snap to her as she shuffles in and crosses the front of the room to the final empty desk; now the mutterings and eye-rolls begin.

Slut. Desperate. Attention-whore.

In less than ten seconds she has fallen from the graces of confidence and pride to the depths of degradation and shame.

Slut-shaming is an epidemic that is spreading like wildfire across not only this nation, but the entire world. Women everywhere are being persecuted and patronized for hateful labels society prints on them based solely, and prejudicially, on their choice of clothing.

Based on the teachings of outdated generations, young girls are being brought up with the idea forced down their throats that the physical female form is something to be ashamed of. Parts of the female anatomy, even ones shared by both sexes such as the thigh or torso, have been over-sexualized on women by the media, resulting in the widely-accepted taboo of exposing such features to the public.

This idea of “defensive dressing” must end.

Nowadays in courtrooms it is a commonly deployed defense mechanism of an accused rapist on trial to claim that the victim was “asking for it” based on their choice of clothing. The atrocity of victim-blaming has stemmed directly from the stigma that women exposing their bodies are to be treated as cheap trash and are deserving of any hateful act committed against them. In fact, in 2011 police officer Michael Sanguinetti spoke at a safety seminar at a law school in Toronto and was quoted saying, “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

Young girls in school are taught to shield their bodies from the world in order to protect themselves from the supposedly uncontrollable eyes of men. Not only is this propaganda toxic to the female population by telling girls from day one that it is themselves who cause their own misfortune based on a skirt deemed too short or a neckline seen as too low, but it is also insulting towards the male population who are now depicted as animals who cannot control themselves from committing acts of sexual violence simply because of a woman’s choice of clothing.

The vicious rise in justified rape culture is poisoning this nation, and creating a world where the physical accentuation of confidence a girl feels in her body is deemed not only disgusting, but also dangerous0.

So just remember, next time you call someone a slut or a whore because of what they are wearing,  it is your hateful judgment and superficial assumptions that are allowing the justification of shame and violence against women.