title:  Florida Judge Blames Rape Victim For Attending Music Festival
text: The Ultra Music Festival in Miami is one of the largest electronic dance music festivals in the World. Over 170,000 people attended this year, and with it came several arrests, but one of the most horrific was the rape of a tourist from Brazil, which was blamed by a Florida judge due to the festival.Transit worker for the Department of Transportation and Public Works in Miami, Carl Lee Wilt, allegedly took the 22-year-old girl into a utility closet after she was prevented from boarding a public transit train for being too intoxicated, according to the police report.A witness harassed police officers in the area for 15 minutes until they decided to knock on the utility door, which Wilt opened five minutes later with his pants undone. Police said Wilt admitted to sexually assaulting the girl, but apparently stopped when she defecated herself.The girl told officers she had no recollection of how she met Wilt or what happened during their encounter.Miami-Dade judge Nushin Sayfie ordered Wilt be held without bond, who faces kidnapping and sexual battery charges, but then proceeded to blame the victim and the Ultra Music Festival for the rape. This is why we shouldn t let our kids go to Ultra   right here,  Sayfie said, who was appointed by former Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist in 2007. Her argument is straight out of the 1984 Kevin Bacon film, Footloose, in which a small town has banned dancing and rock music. Unlike policing victims  behavior, educating people about rape can make lasting progress toward prevention. One study showed that after just one hour of education on sexual assault, men were less likely to believe myths about rape or consider being sexually coercive,  wrote Suzannah Weiss in a 2015 article for Bustle.  Once we recognize that sexual assault can happen to anyone, we can stop wondering what the victim did to deserve it and start wondering what allowed the perpetrator to go through with it. That s the only way we can gain the control we crave and create the  just world  we want to believe in. It is deeply disturbing this type of  blame-the-victim  language is coming from a judge in one of the biggest cities in the country. Carl Lee Wilt would have raped someone given the opportunity to, no matter whether there was a dance festival going on or not. Judge Sayfie should reevaluate her own judgment on these issues before presiding over another similar case. Featured image via Flickr