Whenever someone makes the argument that one way to stop rape is to teach men not to rape, the response is usually some form of “but most men know that rape is wrong.” I don’t doubt that most men would say rape is wrong. I haven’t been out in the field to conduct a study on men’s attitudes toward rape, but we’ve had enough education around rape and sexual assault that it’s not hard to believe most men, if asked, would say rape is a bad thing. Great.

The problem is this — what do they consider rape? When the United Nations conducted a survey on sexual violence in Asia, “researchers intentionally didn’t use the word ‘rape’ in any ...