If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time (you’re the best!) you might remember the De Anza rape case. The case in which three women were ready to testify saying that they witnessed a girl being raped at a De Anza college party (and tried in to stop it) but for some reason, the county never asked them to give grand jury testimony and the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Well, apparently it only gets worse, as yesterday’s news reports that:

The Santa Clara County crime lab never tested some physical evidence seized in the De Anza alleged gang-rape case after the district attorney’s office notified the lab that “no further testing was needed,” a crime lab supervisor has testified in an ongoing civil case. That untested evidence, according to a written report submitted by a crime lab examiner, included clothing, a comforter, a vomit-covered paint can, and a sheet from the hospital examination of the alleged victim. In sexual assault cases, such evidence often is tested for DNA that could link the accused perpetrators to the victim.

Last week Feministing published a guest post from three student activists at Wheaton College (MA) who have made some very articulate and appropriate demands from their school in regards to reforming the sexual misconduct policy. Similarly, Wesleyan University students, alumni, and parents have joined forces to demand that the school create a staff position dedicated to sexual violence.

The University of Maryland is starting up a new mandatory sexual assault prevention education program for incoming students next year. There aren’t details on the program but “it will likely be incorporated into freshman orientation and be similar to the university’s online alcohol education program, AlcoholEdu.” Does anyone have any experience with online modules like AlcoholEdu? I haven’t seen one yet, and hope to fix that this summer, but my knee-jerk reaction is that something like sexual assault prevention requires personal interaction. Or maybe I just need to get with the way of the future…?

One day into Sexual Assault Awareness month and the internet is on fire with campus SA news. First of all, while not explicitly college-related, check out the President Obama’s SSAM Proclamation.

This week, a lot of attention has been given to an article posted in an American University newspaper that, among other things, that date-rape doesn’t exist and any woman who goes to a man’s room “wants sex.” To be honest, I don’t have much to add to the conversation that hasn’t been addressed elsewhere, except to say that I’ve been really impressed with the impassioned student response, and would like to remind student journalists about what it means to be a good editor. Glad to see that the editors at the Eagle are reviewing their editorial policy.

The Maryland Attorney General’s office has apparently issued the opinion that MD colleges and universities are not allowed to keep disciplinary records in cases of sexual assault private. Schools have long kept these records sealed, claiming that by making them public they would be violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I’m interested in how this plays out; look for a longer blog post in the future, I’m definitely not comfortable with the tone the article takes regarding accessing these records once they are released.

Faculty at Gonzaga University are protesting the school’s decision not to allow a performance of the Vagina Monologues on campus as it has been deemed “is inconsistent with being Jesuit and Catholic.”  Their letter to the editor sparks a really interesting dialogue on how to discuss sex and sexual assault on a historically religious campus. Another future blog post….? Anyone want to weigh in on their experience with the issue?

There has been some excellent journalism lately about rape on campus. First check out this  great piece about how Clery numbers coming out of colleges and universities in Vermont don’t match up to the reality of sexual assault on campus. Also the Huffington Post now has a campus reporting team, and yesterday published this student-written piece on sexual assault at BU.

Quickly wanted to highlight some positive steps coming out of a number of schools this week, some in response to the CPI work and some not.

A male columnist at UMass’ Daily Collegian newspaper reflects with anger on the information brought to light in CPI’s report on UMass, and calls on men to stop sexual violence. Choice policy-related quote:

You’ll notice in our Student Code of Conduct – if you’ve ever read it – that the “Appliance Guidelines” are about half a page. You know, stuff like unplugging your refrigerators over break. Sexual assault? One sentence. Rape? Nothing. It seems like UMass cares more about its furniture policy than about educating men and women about rape. The very day the Boston Globe article and subsequent Collegian coverage came out, UMass students got an e-mail from Housing and Residence Life reminding us about the “Fire safety Policy Compliance Advisory.” Seriously? How about e-mail reminders to all the men on campus that rape is illegal? Plagiarism is not illegal in American law, but I can get expelled for that. Rape is illegal, but I can still graduate with honors.

At the University of Maryland, a University Senate committee is “compiling a report to document the issue of rape at the university” after realizing how how the statistics are. In 2008, UMD recorded 17 incidents of “forcible sexual offenses.” 17…reported.

A writer from the University of Arizona’s Daily Wildcat responds to a column in last week’s Daily Princetonian (out of Princeton University) where a female student said of her friend who claims to have been sexually assaulted:

We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense. Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.

Students at the University of Louisville are lobbying the university senate to “approve a bill that would expand domestic-violence protections to people in dating relationships.”

One of the last pieces related to the CPI report published last week was an investigation out of Wisconsin focusing on UW-Madison. UW-M’s PAVE (Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment) released what I thought was a pretty respectful response including:

Despite all well-intentioned efforts to meet the needs of victims, at times, as demonstrated in the CPI report, these services may not meet victims’ needs or expectations. In these unfortunate instances, it is important to acknowledge victims’ experiences and to utilize their feedback as a means to continually evaluate the effectiveness of current services. While there are challenges that need to be resolved to address sexual assaults, we, as a campus community, are ultimately responsible for preventing these crimes and for holding perpetrators accountable. PAVE and its campus partners will continue to work together to implement the most effective preventative and educational measures and to support victims on this campus.

Keep it up!

First some campus news…

According to Yale Daily News, while burglaries and theft decreased in 2008, the number of sexual assaults in residence halls tripled from 2007 to 2008. The number of liquor violations also increased significantly from 2006– not a surprise, given that many campus assaults involve alcohol. It is worth mentioning that university officials think this might be due to increased incident reports filed by students.

The University of Maryland kicked off a new dating violence program (The Red Flag Campaign) last week. To promote the event, red flags were placed throughout the campus to call attention to dating violence, and:

There will also be posters in residence halls and on campus programs to warn students about the signs of dating violence which include excessive jealousy, emotional abuse, one partner isolating the other from family and friends, stalking and sexual assault.

The campaign already exists on a number of campuses, and was originally created for Virginia’s colleges and universities to raise statewide awareness of dating violence among students.

And now for some hot topics…

A lot of people are discussing Letterman and his exhortation, but there is another issue that needs to be explored… sex in the workplace. Jezebel mentions that Letterman paid Birkitt’s (his assistant) law school bill. Would he have done so if he was not sleeping with her? Doubtful.

Fuller doesn’t mention the problems boss-employee relationships can create for those not fucking the boss, who may be intentionally or unintentionally discriminated against in favor of the office paramour. And though she does throw out the phrase “power relationship,” she doesn’t explicitly point out the dangers for a subordinate sleeping with her superior, especially if that superior is David Letterman.

And finally, When Is Rape Not Rape?, another piece on the whole Polanski affair, which is quickly becoming a debate on what qualifies as being rape (apparently being drugged, raped, and sodomized and being charged with such doesn’t matter). The NYT points out that since Polanski is an “artiste,” a lauded position in French society, many feel he should be excused due to the excellence of his work.

Apparently us Americans are considered too morally rigid for expecting a man convicted of a crime to be punished, even thirty years after the fact. It was his choice to flee on the eve of sentencing, and therefore his choice to delay punishment until now. It does not matter that the Samantha Gailey supposedly forgave him. Charges were brought against him when she was thirteen, and he was found guilty. Our laws exist to protect all individuals against criminals, and not just the non-artiste ones.

Hat tip to Morgan at Speaking Out for alerting me to this great interview with Ruth Ann Koenick, who founded one of the first rape crisis centers in the country while a student at the University of Maryland.

I was an undergraduate working for residence life, on the cusp of trying to decide what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was living on campus when a student on my floor was abducted and raped. I went to meet her at the police station and then to the hospital, and I felt totally inept, but I knew enough to know that she wasn’t getting what she needed. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, and we were kept in separate rooms. She was all alone and no matter what I did, I couldn’t talk to her. I realized the system wasn’t working for victims.

Sometime later, there was a series of abductions and rapes that overwhelmed the university, not because people didn’t want to help but because we didn’t know how. It hit the front pages of the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, and it became an even bigger issue. I teamed up with two friends who also worked for residence life and were in grad school, Chris Courtois and Debby Watts, and worked with folks in student affairs to open a campus rape crisis center. It operated on the beg-borrow-and-steal budget, but we got support from Dan Bratton, the Vice President for Student Affairs, and others in leadership positions, partially because he made them do this and partially because some of them knew it was the right thing to do.

We really didn’t know much but quickly discovered that we knew more than others, and when we started to talk about this publicly, women came out from the woodwork to tell us what had happened to them. Eventually we got space in the health center, developed training, took overnight shifts, and responded to crisis calls. We developed a really good relationship with the university police and, in retrospect, worked as a team. This was 1973-74, just before the first Burgess and Holmstrom book (Rape: Victims of Crisis) came out in 1975 and people began to use the term rape-trauma syndrome.

Her on the ground model of learning from the people she is helping continues to drive her work today and has shaped the work of anti-violence activists for the last 30 years. I hope you have a chance to check out the rest of the article – she’s a great example of what a determined student can achieve!

(And PS, University of Maryland, I hope you’re keeping her legacy alive – don’t cut back your sexual assault services.)

Last week there was an article in the UMaryland student newspaper about the new Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Program Advocate Office being created to replace the Office of the Victim Advocate, whose grant had expires. On first look, it sounds great,

Health center administrators say the restructured program will not reduce the counseling and education services previously provided and may even enhance the center’s ability to help students. While past programs relied on part-time employees and graduate students, SARPP will now be headed by a full-time employee.

full time staff being one of the things that SAFER really advocates for. However, I knew that we’d been in touch with some students at Maryland who were really unhappy about how the university was handling the potential closing of the Office of the Victim Advocate, so we asked one of them what was really up. Our correspondent, a recent graduate, asked that we keep his/her identity anonymous, but agreed that we could reprint his/her response.

I have graduated from UMD, so I can’t speak as to what is going on there right now, but to answer your question, the change the article speaks of is not what we wanted. The article certainly makes it seem like it will be a better thing, but what it does is merge two of our programs, the Office of the Victim Advocate, which provided advocate services for victims and also did outreach through events and presentations, and the education group SAFER
- Student Advocates For Education about Rape. [Not in any way affiliated with us]

What this merge has done is taken two departments, who previously had a total of 5 graduate students (2 in PhD programs) all at 30 hours per week in addition to around 20 undergraduate students, and make it into one department with one person at 40 hours per week and two graduate assistants whom I assume will be at 20 hours a week each. It’s definitely a significant cut-back – and part of what made OVA so desirable to students was the ability to talk to another student. The client load at OVA jumped by nearly 300% when it started using undergraduate students 2 years ago.

He/she added in a follow up:

…there are undergraduates still working in the office, the original plan did not include them but I guess they were added at some point.

It’s unclear how many, however, as everyone he/she worked with in the Office of the Victim Advocate has graduated or left in frustration.

I want to be clear here. What UMaryland is now offering is still better than what many schools offer. What they had, though, was a program nationally recognized for its excellence – and that’s not what they will have this year. Most importantly, what they have now is not what the students wanted. That’s a serious loss for all students at UMaryland, particularly the estimated 750 students who will be deciding this year if they can trust UMaryland to help them deal with the trauma of being raped. I’m not sure that almost halving the number of staff hours for survivor and prevention services and then calling it a possible enhancement is likely to engender strong feelings of trust among your students.

UM ban on names draws protests — baltimoresun.com
The University of Maryland (College ParK) has a problem with assault victims naming their attackers on shirts created for the Clothesline Project. Heaven forbid the community actually hold someone accountable for violence. Heaven forbid someone actually say “I was raped and so-and-so did it.” Because that might cause trouble. And trouble is worse than people being raped (scroll down to letter to the editor from director of Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault)