If I only had one wish for the media...

Only one? But there are so many things that could use changing or tweaking. False equivalency of views in an effort to seem fair, corporate control of news shows, the increasing focus on ratings rather than substance, the fourth hour of the Today Show, all the stories about side boob on the Huffington Post. You know all the things they rail against on The Newsroom.

But all of these fall to the wayside when I think about the single most outrageous thing I see in the news media and that is how they continue to equate rape and abuse with sex. It is appalling and it needs to stop.

Quite frankly I thought we had already fought and won this war a couple of decades ago. In my years as a student anti-rape activist all those idealized years ago, it seemed that I spent half my time speaking with the news media educating them on this very point. And for the most part they got it.

Fast forward to present day. I don't know if I stopped paying attention to the way media stories were reported, or things have really regressed in this area, but it seems that I can't look at news story about child trafficking, rape or other abuse without seeing a certain degree of prurient titillating equation of these horrific nightmares with sex.

Thanks to the evolution of tracking software, an increased focus by local and federal law enforcement agencies, and pressure by lobbying groups such as the National Association for the Protection of Children (protect.org), there have been an increasing number of high profile busts of child pornography and trafficking rings resulting in numerous arrests of the adult purveyors of this evil and rescues of the children enslaved in these unspeakable horrors.

The most common and shocking of the media's errors in reporting on these stories is the repeated referral to the victims of these crimes as teenage or child prostitutes. This term implies that somehow the victims of these unspeakable crimes were willful participants in the acts in which they were forced to participate. Whereas the media could refer to these children more appropriately as "teenage victims" the term prostitute is repeatedly foisted upon them, in essence victimizing them once again.

Recently, The Huffington Post inexplicably ran a story with the headline "Former Teen Prostitute's Racy Lingerie Show" complete with a picture of a young girl wearing a bikini top which looked like two facial tissues covering her small breasts. Besides wondering what the news value of this story was, the story's apparent exploitation of child slavery and its wink wink, nudge nudge tone was enough to make one sick to their stomach.

When the victims are older, the coverage is no less sensational, and even less compassionate. The recent scandal involving the systematic rape and harassment of female officers and enlisted members of the Air Force at a base in Texas offers a perfect example of this. Almost every story I read about this refers to it as the "Air Force Sex Scandal." Referring to a culture in which women are constantly subjected to the threat of rape and degradation on a daily basis, and an atmosphere where these crimes are either ignored or worse excused is not a "sex scandal." Using the word "sex" in describing this belittles the suffering these servicewomen have suffered and furthermore promotes an attitude wherein the perpetrator's actions are excused and the victims are blamed. This isn't a racy Friday night soft porn flick on Skinemax, it is a violent, devastating, dehumanizing crime and should be treated as such.

In fact, we rarely even hear the word rape anywhere in the media anymore. Instead we hear "sexual assault" or simply "assault." Rape is an ugly word, I admit. It should be an ugly word. It is an ugly crime. The word is viscerally violent and carries with it all of the pain and destruction that it denotes. Replacing it with a term that is more palatable softens the crime and lessens its impact on society.

It's time for the news media to get with the program. Stop conflating rape and sex. Stop conflating the enslavement of children with cheeky, exploitative juvenile bawdiness. Just stop. You are doing the public and yourself a disservice.