Trigger Warning:
Naomi blogged last week about the upsetting findings that one in five women on college campuses are sexually assaulted, noting that "on-campus rape has not diminished, in no small part because campus authorities do next to nothing to deter it." Dialogue about the epidemic of rape on college campuses, seemingly safe and bucolic spaces, has been explosive this week in response to a study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity.
CNN explained the context for the CPI study: "The shocking statistics of rape and attempted rape on campus came to light in a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice nine years ago. But the recently released series published by the Washington center shows that while federal law requires schools to act on sexual assault allegations and look out for the rights of victims, many higher-education institutions aren't making the grade."
Jezebel described the study as "chilling." Among CPI's findings: "Many student victims don’t report incidents at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are 'he said, she said' disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol." Although this isn't new, CPI brings renewed attention to a "culture of indifference." RH Reality Check rightly criticized college administrators and said, "While I...understand that the role of a college is first and foremost to foster personal growth through learning, there is no excuse for turning one person’s rape into another’s 'teachable moment'" and "valuing an educational ideal over the health and safety of other students is unacceptable...and dangerous."
Feministing plugged the Campus Accountability Project as a "great tool for student organizers who are trying to change policy and programming on their campus, but it also plays a big role in promoting administrative transparency and reminding schools that policy matters." CAP, with SAFER (Students Active For Ending Rape) is "the only organization that fights sexual violence and rape culture by empowering student-led campaigns to reform college sexual assault policies."
Distressingly, these are uphill battles. As CNN noted, "Many said administrators appeared more concerned with protecting their employer, or the school's reputation, than they were with protecting students."
Kristen Lombardi, CPI's lead researcher on this report, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about the dismissive stance that campus administrators often take: "Many incidents go beyond 'miscommunication' among two drunk students - a common characterization among school officials - to predatory acts."
To teach college students that rape is a forgivable transgression undoes so much of the important progress that student advocates and educators have worked for. But, as Naomi expressed in her post last week, the coverage of CPI's report has "made me a bit hopeful that things will get better." We'll keep hoping and working for improvements. -TLF
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
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2 comments:
Hi there! Just wanted to say thanks for including SAFER in this post and spreading the word about the issue.
Best,
Sarah (from SAFER)
A few follow-up pieces from NPR:
An interview with Sharyn Potter, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, about their "Bringing In Bystanders" campaign to educate and empower the campus community to take action against sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and stalking. The posters to which she refers can be viewed here.
They include images of students about to intervene when they see a guy leading an intoxicated girl upstairs at a party, a guy standing up for a girl walking on the sidewalk who's being harassed by guys in a car, friends responding with "I believe you" and "It's not your fault" when a girl says she was raped, and students being supportive of a gay friend when he admits that his partner has been abusing him.
Also, this piece, also from Talk of the Nation, titled "Myths That Make It Hard to Stop Campus Rape," gives some findings from a psychologist/researcher who has studied rapists for over 20 years. Among them, that 1 in 16 college men answered 'yes' to questions such as "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?" Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?"
He found that these men actually love to brag about their "conquests" and that, despite the commonly held notion that most campus sexual assault happens because both people are drunk and the guy makes a bad decision, "on college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes."
The professor in the first story echoes this statistic when she says, "[...]the perpetrator is being camouflaged by his friends, right? They're having the party with the alcohol. They're setting it up. They're buying the alcohol and the perpetrators use these parties to target and rape their victims. And these perpetrators are not, like the 15 percent that we think about who, you know, who jump out of the bush with the winter hat. These are people that we go to school with every day, we see every day. [...]It's the culture that - the pervasive culture that condones the violence against women that just lets the perpetrators continue to perpetrate over and over again."
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