School assemblies are pretty much hit or miss opportunities. The attention of younger students is hard to keep and approaching them the wrong way could shut them out entirely. But a recent assembly at a Texas school about rape and domestic abuse reportedly got off on the wrong foot and got even worse as time went on.

According to the Root, a speaker visited Humble High School to speak to ninth and tenth grade girls for International Women’s Day. The conversation started off with positive messages of self-love, but became problematic when the speaker singled out a group of girls in the audience.

“She said when she moves the cover from over your face and they start swabbing and combing the hair, she was explaining the rape kit; she said she would not feel bad for us. She said she would tell us, ‘Oh, I told you this was going to happen to you’,” said Chantranise Lane, a sophomore at the school, according to KHOU.

The school later confirmed that the speaker turned the conversation towards respectability politics and pointed out what some of the girls chose to wear and the kind of impression they may give off on social media. Some of the girls were shocked and felt the speaker was blaming them for somehow provoking a potential assault. There were even some victims of past assaults in the audience that couldn’t hold back their tears.

To make matters even worse, the speaker reportedly told certain girls that if they didn’t heed her warnings and she came across them while conducting a rape kit, she wouldn’t have any sympathy.

Another major issue the students noticed was how none of their male classmates were allowed to be in attendance, which further suggests that women should be held responsible for preventing their own rape or assaults without proactively teaching men not to be abusers at a young age.

The assembly was reportedly cancelled early due to the students’ reaction, as was a later scheduled one for the upperclassmen girls.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons