A trip to your local pizza restaurant doesn’t typically include seeing a female mannequin, covered in blood and in a body bag.

But at Papa John’s Pizza on Westwood Boulevard, unsuspecting patrons and passersby confront this graphic Halloween decoration at the front of the shop.

This decoration is a symptom of a larger problem.

Halloween is a time for all things horror and gore. But some movies and decorations slip into familiar patterns of misogyny without considering the harm this causes women in the real world. When a sexual assault reportedly occurs at a UCLA residence hall in the week leading up to Halloween and news about the alleged rape at Cornell floods headlines, the way we represent women in media carries even more importance.

[Related: Sexual violence isn’t unique to Cornell. UCLA must review its own policies]

Students should think critically about the Halloween content they consume this October. When what’s being called scary is actually just targeted brutality, students should disengage to stop the normalization of violence against women.

Sarah Reid, a second-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student, said seeing women brutalized in media can make people think harm is acceptable.

A 2021 study from the National Library of Medicine found the same: An uptick in media representation of violence against women has resulted in an increase in acceptance toward domestic violence.

Some may argue that these are simply decorations or just fictional movies – nothing more than painted plastic and fabricated stories. But the harm this content can normalize is painfully real.

Only about half of all domestic violence incidents are reported to law enforcement, according to USAFact’s analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey. About a quarter of women experience intimate partner violence, per the same survey.

“We shouldn’t grow to see violence against women as normal, especially when, unfortunately, it is common,” said Colleen De Allaune, a UCLA alumnus and member of Shining Stars, a horror movie club.

Even if you believe this representation is harmless, there’s no denying that in the current political landscape, these depictions are out of touch.

Evelyn Smith, a production and directing graduate student, said she believes reception theory – the idea that how we interpret the meaning of something comes from external context – impacts how we interpret Halloween movies and decorations. This may cause students to view gory depictions of women as more insensitive this Halloween, she added.

The threat of sexual harassment and violence is already real for Bruins. We don’t need to see it further normalized by disrespectful depictions. It’s every student’s job to call out movies and decorations that make a bad problem worse.

After all, gore and brutality targeted at women are not a requirement for scary decorations or movies.

If violence against a woman in a horror movie wouldn’t make sense if it applied to characters who are men, filmmakers should have an explicit reason – beyond sexualized gore – for creating it that way, De Allaune said. For example, a woman character in a horror movie shouldn’t die in a graphic way just so she can be sexualized while doing it, they added.

Horror content should explore what scares people in a thoughtful way – not simply display violent cruelty, Smith said.

“Where you have a character and it’s less about the violence and more about how much they’re suffering, and for me, that’s what puts a bad taste in my mouth,” Smith added.

While the decorations in the window of a pizza shop may seem harmless to some, Bruins have a responsibility to recognize how these depictions can cause damage that seeps past window sills and TV screens.

Violence against women is far too normalized. Disengaging from content that brutalizes women is an integral step dismantling that.