I think a lot about how to convince people that sexual assault on college campuses IS as common as the statistics dictate (yes, this is what I think about, sad life, I know). It seems that a mixture of apathy, denial, claims that in one way or another “she was asking for it,” and the myth of “gray rape” have relegated campus assault to the realm of “it’s awful when it happens, but it’s not as much of a problem as all those crazy feminists make it out to be.” This attitude is destructive; it affects the way we teach young people about assault, it affects the services we offer students, it affects how the crime is (or isn’t) prosecuted, and it affects how the media covers the topic.
With that in mind, I decided to go back through a month’s worth of news and see what I could find about sexual assault on college campuses. Below are the results, colleges with sexual assaults reported on from April 20 to May 20 (some stories may be triggering):
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
University of Pittsburgh at Titusville
University of Louisiana at Monroe
California State University, Northridge
I hope that looking at that list is as striking to you as it is to me. That’s 25 reports in 31 days.
Admittedly, this is not a list that one can draw any kind of straightforward conclusion from about the frequency of campus assault—a couple of these incidents are months old, a number are still “alleged” assaults, one refers to an attempted assault, and a couple are cases of college students who were assaulted off campus, or assaulted by non-college students. In fact, it seems that assaults are most likely to get media attention when they are “stranger rapes,” and not when students are assaulted by people they know, which we know to be the most common assault cases. This gap between the reality of assault and what gets published probably has a number of causes, ranging from prejudice to pragmatics (i.e., date rapes make less compelling news stories, but are also perhaps less likely to be reported to school officials or more likely to be dealt with on campus).
But still, the numbers are telling. Take these 25 stories and add all of the assaults that occurred between April 20 and May 20 that were never reported (60% of all assaults are not). Or were reported and dismissed. Or were reported but never made it to the news. The numbers get pretty staggering pretty quickly. It’s also striking to me that of these 25 stories, 1 deals with the rape of male student and 4 incidents occurred at frat parties** or frat events. At least one mentions date-rape drugs, one involves a university basketball coach, and one reports on a female student who was raped by her boyfriend. I don’t like referring to people’s traumas as mere numbers, but when you look at all of the different kinds of assault—all of the different threats faced by young men and women—and then you multiply them exponentially…it can take your breath away.
(**This is really disturbing. When are we going to deal with the issue of fraternaties and assault, large-scale? It doesn’t seem as though it will ever stop or be taken seriously)
