Monthly Archives: September 2009

Tufts University, You, Your Partner, and Your Roommate

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I can’t believe I missed this!

Tufts University has taken a bold step toward regulating sexual activity in dorm rooms. The school, whose main campus is in Medford, Mass., instituted a new policy for students with roommates in on-campus housing: No sex while the other roommate is in the room, and no sexual activity should interfere with a roommate’s privacy, study, or sleep.

Well that’s…interesting. What’s odd about this policy is that it’s not really a policy. A rep for Res Life said:

The sex policy, Ales-Rich said, is intended as a tool to facilitate conversation and compromise between roommates, rather than simply proscribe behavior. Ales-Rich emphasized that ResLife hopes students will be able to resolve the issues on their own instead of allowing conflicts to reach a point at which the office has to intervene.

“We want to make perfectly clear that we do not want to hinder someone from engaging in any personal or private activity,” she said. “But when it becomes uncomfortable for the roommate, we want to have something in place that empowers the residents to have a good conversation with the roommate.”

So the policy is really nothing more than a conversation-starter? Are there any actual repercussions for breaking the rule? Wouldn’t it have made sense to start an ACTUAL conversation with students about sexual etiquette before just making an arbitrary rule? Says Tufts: no, because that would make people uncomfortable!

ResLife saw a need to take the lead in addressing the issue due to its sensitive nature, according to Ales-Rich. “We found in the past that when it comes to sexual activity in the room, students find it an uncomfortable topic to talk about,” she said.

On its face, I don’t really have a problem with this policy in the sense that it is really just a guideline, as one commenter at the Tufts Daily News points out:

“The Residents’ Bill of Rights…clearly states that students have “the right to free access to your room without pressure from your room mate(s)” and “the right to study [and] sleep without undue disturbances from noise, guests, room mate(s), etc.” This includes “sexiling” and “performing for an audience” of one. This part of the policy needed to be spelled out because it was becoming more and more of an issue. Now, students have something specific to bring up when a room mate decides to be a jackass and do something like this.

And I think that’s more or less correct. It just seems like the whole situation could have been prevented if there had been some more “uncomfortable” conversations going on beforehand. Also the idea of a school in any way regulating consensual sexual behavior—even if there is no real threat of discipline—is really crossing a line.

But more than anything, this rubs me the wrong way because of the sorry state of Tuft’s Sexual Assault Policy. As a writer at the Tufts University Survivors of Rape and Sexual Assault said:

Hmmm…you know what else is of a sensitive nature and uncomfortable to talk about? SEXUAL ASSAULT. Why is Tufts so willing to take initiative to create policies about consensual sexual activities, but failed for so long to acknowledge that sexual assault is a problem for the students (not just the school’s reputation) and to “take the lead” in addressing it?

The Tufts’ survivor’s blog is full of info on why the Tuft’s policy is inadequate, but among other things, the policy has no definition of rape, sexual assault, or consent. So Tufts can take the time to clearly delineate what is and is not appropriate for you and your partner to do in your dorm, but when it comes to sexual assault, students are left in the dark. Take for example the sexual assault policy that appears on the Tufts website and compare it to the policy on relationships between students and their professors. Definitions abound in the latter! And that’s great, because it’s important…but why the gap? The school seriously needs to reprioritize. Waking up to the sounds of your roommate having sex could very well be a huge problem for some folks, above and beyond it being irritating and uncomfortable. But damn, how about spending some of that valuable administrative time and clarifying the policy on rape?

Apparently We Need to Discuss False Reporting Again

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Occasionally this blog gets comments that I choose not to publish because they just re-hash the same victim-blaming/”reverse sexism” arguments that we constantly write about, and we just don’t have the time to respond to all of them (nor do they forward the conversation in any way). But we got an anonymous comment yesterday that I wanted to take a few minutes and address:

A topic that comes up again and again is that of intentionally false accusations of rape. Sadly, though it occurs, it’s existence is denied by feminists, and dismissed by feminists as insignificant, so rare as to be ignorable, a good object lesson for men, and so on…

Is there any greater evidence that your blog is about oppression and bigotry than your lack of any discussion or condemnation of the hofstra false rape accusations.

In March, Nora posted this illuminating, must-read report from the National Center for Prosecution of Violence Against Women on false rape claims. The authors conclude that 2-8% of rape reports are false.

Fact: this is a small number. Fact: whenever there is a report of a rape, people constantly bring up false reporting as though it is a rampant occurrence ruining the lives of innocent men right and left, and proliferating the myth that the percentage of false reports is much higher.

The above facts do not negate a third, also important fact: false rape claims do a lot of harm, both to the people wrongly accused and to the assault survivors who are made to feel as though they won’t be believed if they come forward. I don’t see a contradiction with working for an organization that values the idea of a culture where rape survivors are given the proper support and not blamed for the crimes against them (which I do) and supporting the work of a group like the Innocence Project who works to free the wrongly incarcerated (which I do). No one who is committed to social justice and/or the rights of assault survivors has any interest absolving false rape claims.

So why did I not immediately post a serious condemnation of the female Hofstra student? Why did I instead link to blogs where folks like Amanda were discussing how one reason for false rape claims [and not a justification, might I add] might be that women are taught to be ashamed of their sexual behavior and fear being called sluts and whores (which people in fact DID call her as soon as she recanted)?

Because as soon as she recanted I, and the rest of the like-minded anti-violence community, knew that she was going to be held up as an example. False rape claims ARE so rare, that whenever there is a highly publicized one, everyone pounces on the opportunity to talk about how false reports ruins lives, and that the man-hating feminist witch-hunt that makes rape seem like a larger problem than it is has now claimed more victims.  (And they did.)

So anticipating that response—and taking for granted that false reports are bad and innocent people should not be charged with crimes they didn’t commit—writers like Amanda, Jaclyn, and Ann, decided to try and steer the conversation in another direction: Why do women make false reports? Why does it get reported on so widely when real rapes hardly get any press? Asking these questions isn’t in any way justifying false claims or reflective of bigotry against men. To say that is really like calling someone “unpatriotic” if they question what America has done to anger other nations in the wake on an attack on the US.

Personally, I didn’t spend much of my time on the Hofstra recant because I come across false rape claim stories maybe a few times a year. This is what I come across a few times a week:

Kutztown University police investigating sexual assault attempt—9/23/09

“This is the seventh reported sexual assault downtown or on campus [at Penn State] since the end of August”—9/22/09

Kansas University Student Reports Rape in Dorm Room—9/21/09

Purdue Police Invesitgate Sexual Assault—9/21/09

Sexual Assault Report at Sigma Chi [University of Cincinnati]—9/18/09

Where is the outcry over justice for these women?

[Don't forget to vote for SAFER so we can continue our work fighting campus sexual assault]
My Idea

So, Roman Polanski Was Arrested

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Dear Media,

When a man rapes a child—even if he is a famous, talented filmmaker—is it really that hard to refer to the rape as a rape, as opposed to a “sex case,” or “underage sex,” or “having sex with a 13 year-old girl“?  Shouldn’t the very phrase “having sex with a 13 year-old girl” evoke revulsion?

Furthermore, I am a strong believer in past experiences, contexts, and trauma informing—not justifying but definitely influencing—criminal behavior. However, I cannot see any cause/effect that makes the death of a parent at the hands of the Nazis or the vicious murder of a wife relevant to the rape of a young girl. Yes, Roman Polanski has had some unspeakably horrible things happen to him. But so have a lot of other people who are sentenced for committing crimes in this country, and as long as that’s how the legal system works, Polanski doesn’t get a pass. The “how can you arrest him for rape, his Mom died in the Holocaust!” argument is absurd. So please, stop bringing it up.

I leave the rest to Jeff Fecke, who has a great post on the response to the arrest. The Sexist also has a good break-down of the pro-Polanski responses.

The Nice Guy

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A topic that comes up again and again is that of the “nice guy rapist,” or “acquaintance rapist.” He might be a good friend or someone that everyone considers a all-around good guy. This type of rapist is more common than the one depicted in movies or stories; the one that looks sinister and lurks in the shadows.

An article from the Centre Daily discusses the confusion and backlash that often follows when a woman is a survivor of an acquaintance rape:

“When they realize what happened to them is not OK, they struggle with, ‘Who can I tell?’ Because everyone else knows him, because everyone else thinks he’s a great guy,” Fishel said.
To one former Penn State student, this profile is all too familiar. Several years ago, she reported to police that she was raped on campus by a man she’d recently met.
“I knew that I was going to be blamed for it,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “My own mother, when I first told her, was like, ‘What did you do? What were you wearing?’ It’s just a perfect example of the way society treats it.”
She found the backlash for reporting the assault almost worse than the assault itself.
“Someone said she was sorry that I regretted having sex with him and had to bring this out against him,” she said. Other people told her, “He is such a loving and wonderful guy, how could I ever accuse someone like that of being essentially a rapist.”

One woman who had been sexually assaulted used facebook as a creep check. Obviously she couldn’t have known that her attacker would do anything to her, but it does show the extent to which people use social networking sites to see if potential friends or dates pass the normalcy test. Family photos? Check. Normal hobbies? Check. Plenty of friend posts? Must be well-liked… check.

Unfortunately, that leads to an early conviction that the individual can be trusted:

“What I saw of his profile and stuff like that was pictures of him and his parents,” she said. “You’re not going to assume that he’s some kind of, someone that’s going to harm you in any way.”

These sexual assault scenarios are all too common on campuses and to make matters worse, they are often treated as less traumatic to the victim, when the betrayal of trust can make it all the more worse.

G20RP Sexual Consent Guidelines

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The following was forwarded to me this morning and can also be found online. The G-20 Summit is going on in Pittsburgh right now, and thousands of folks are out protesting. Protest organizers disseminated the below sexual consent guidelines a week ago in preparation for the protest. I think that’s pretty awesome. Large crowds of people—even crowds that purport to be progressive—are always vulnerable sites for sexual assault and the Pittsburgh organizers did a great job of setting up procedures and safe spaces for anyone who is assaulted, and for making it clear what kind of behavior WON’T be tolerated. Check out their definitions of consent, sexual assault, and rape culture.

Announcing the G20RP Sexual Consent Guidelines. Please disseminate widely.

Perpetrators of sexual violence, assault, and harassment are not welcome in Pittsburgh or any G20 protest organizational spaces.

Support Structure for Survivors of Sexualized Violence and Assault:

If you experience harassment, abuse, sexual assault, or any other kind of consent violation while resisting the G20 this September, or if a perpetrator of sexual violence is interfering with your participation in the G20 resistance movement, or for any other reason you need support to deal with sexualized violence, please come to us. There will be trained and experienced advocates and support people for survivors of sexual assault at the WELLNESS SPACE (located in the clinic).

Continue reading →

Men Can Stop Rape v. Tucker Max

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Maybe the best folks to take on Tucker Max are men who—gasp!—don’t see the humor in degrading women and making racist jokes. I know that there are a ton of those guys out there, probably way more than I assume. Some of them work at the very awesome Men Can Stop Rape, who have their own response to Max’s movie:

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell:
5 Things You Can Do on Your Campus

You’ve probably heard about the new Tucker Max film that’s been touring college campuses, igniting protests at premieres, and generating quite an amount of coverage in newspapers and blogs.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which lands in theaters this Friday (Sep 25), features huge amounts of alcohol, sex, and lines such as “your gender is hardwired for whoredom” and “fats girls aren’t real people” (read more of the film’s quotes).

North Carolina State and Ohio State have spoken out when the film premiered on their campus, holding silent protests and showing alternate films like Spin the Bottle.

If you want to counteract the messages in this film, here are 5 things you can do on your college campus:

  • Download and pass out our info sheets, such as “Alcohol, Masculinity and Rape” (download them here)
  • Hang a few of our posters that focus on consent during alcohol or drug intoxication – “So when she was drunk, I BACKED OFF,” “So when her head wasn’t clear, I BACKED OFF,” and “So when she wasn’t ready, I DIDN’T PUSH IT.” (order here)
  • Show educational films such as Spin the Bottle
  • Start a campus group of supportive and active men who can serve as educators to their male peers as well as allies with the women on campus (get help to start a group)
  • Bring us on your campus for an educational workshop (learn more and schedule a date)

While we’re on the topic, the fantastic Jerin, who we at SAFER adore, has a post up at NOW’s young feminists blog on why Max’s “it’s a joke” argument falls flat. Also want to mention the facebook group that one young woman started in protest of the film.

Bills and Billboards

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Ohio is set to join 21 other states in passing a DNA Bill that collects the DNA of all arrested felons. This bill stands to not only help identify criminals sooner, but to help capture rapists and killers before they can repeat their crimes.

Not everyone is entirely happy about the bill, however:

Critics say DNA collection before conviction crosses the line, especially because the bill does not address what happens if a person isn’t convicted.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio opposes the measure, saying it poses a “myriad of civil liberty risks” including violating a person’s constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure, is ripe for abuse and is an invasion of privacy.

Sponsors of the bill say only 13 of 3 billion possible DNA markers are actually retained within the database, and indexed by numbers not names. Genetic traits are also not tracked. In some ways this can be compared to fingerprinting upon arrest, although I’m sure many would disagree with that comparison.

Also, while some argue that the relatively small number of convictions due to testing does not justify the cost of DNA sampling– tell that to anyone who has been raped, or has had a love one murdered.

And here is a short piece about controversy over a Florida billboard. Apparently parents are angry with statements like this: “Sex without consent is rape. Talk about it, prevent it!” Yes, why would you want your child to know that?

One mother defended her perspective by saying that since her daughter is living in her home and she is responsible for her protection, learning about rape is not yet necessary. I would think EVERY parent thinks that way, and can’t ever imagine being in a situation where their child would be left vulnerable. But it does happen, and and while I can understand the uneasiness that can accompany such discussions or knowledge of the topic, protesting over that billboard is absurd.

Too Many Survivors, Not Enough Nurses

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First, unrelated to the post’s title, Amanda at The Sexist is quickly becoming one of my favorite new bloggers. Today she takes on an American University student newspaper who, while giving “advice” to freshmen about sexual experimentation, managed to (as some commenters rightly put it) “normalize sexual assault and drunk-hook ups.” The only thing more frustrating than the original piece is how unapologetic the editors are.

….

Onto the story at hand: In Douglas County, Kansas, a hospital has come under criticism from the county’s for sending rape survivors to out-of-town hospitals for examinations and forensic exams. Two of these survivors were local college students who were treated for injuries at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, but were then sent to Topeka for their forensic exams.

LMH employs sexual assault nurse examiners who are trained to collect evidence for “rape kits,” which prosecutors and investigators use to help solve the case. [DA] Branson claims the hospital doesn’t have enough nurses for the number of sexual assaults that occur in Douglas County.

On Sunday, there weren’t enough nurses available to treat all four rape victims who showed up at the hospital, Branson said…

“There is an incredible amount of shame and embarrassment associated with being the victim of an attack. It takes great courage for a survivor to come forward,” Branson said in the letter. “For them to suffer yet another indignity at being turned away from the emergency room is unconscionable.”

Branson is right on. To be a traumatized assault survivor who arrives at the hospital and then is shipped off to another, further away hospital for examination sounds pretty unbearable. Not to mention that “that turning people away can lead some rape victims to abandon the reporting process and that delays in examination can destroy evidence needed to hold an attacker accountable.” The article does not explain why the hospital doesn’t simply get more of their nurses trained as Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE).

In June, Nora interviewed Karen Carroll, Associate Director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, and the two of them discussed the possibility of having SANEs on staff at campus health centers and the need for schools to be part of sexual assault response teams (SART). SARTs are community-based responses to assault that link up survivors’ advocates, health professionals, and law enforcenment so that when a survivor comes forward there is an established, supportive procedure in place to assist them.

Both a SANE presence on campus and a SART could help prevent situations like the one in campus. If schools and hospitals took sexual assault as seriously as they often claim to, they would take the little extra money necessary to get some folks trained and make sure that there is always a close place for a suvivor to go. Go here for more information on SANE programs and SARTs.

[Don't forget to vote for SAFER so we can continue our work fighting campus sexual assault]
My Idea

Fox NY Covers College Sexual Assault

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Fox NY ran a report last night on campus sexual assault. Sarah, a rape survivor, tells her story in the video below (trigger warning).

I’m fairly pleased with how Fox framed the story. Sarah’s strength as a survivor willing to speak and help others is showcased, and her behavior is never questioned (even though she admits to drinking the night of the rape). It’s a story that is reflective of many campus rapes: he was a friend, they knew each other, they had been drinking, she thought she could trust him. The reporter, for her part, emphasizes the frequency of such assaults and the seriousness with which they deserve to be treated. Also interviewed were representatives from Montclair State University (not the school where this particular rape occurred), a school that, as Nora reported, appears to have a model comphrensive Sexual Assault Response Team.

The Fox report seems to have been sparked by survey results recently released by the Campus Tolerance Foundation. The full set of survey results and the summary can be found here. The survey is—and the CTF opendly admits this—not “scientific.” 2,612 undergraduates on 10 campuses were surveyed on facebook about violence, harassment, and bias on campus. The results in terms of sexual assault are mostly in-line with general statistics on campus assault:

B. Female students are at risk of sexual harassment, assault and date rape
PROOF: 33% of women were victims of serious sexual harassment – forced sex, attempts to force sex, or attempts to force kissing or fondling – or personally know someone who was. Things are worst at Harvard (45%), GWU (43%), and OSU (42%); things are better at the U. of Washington (23%) and Barnard and Texas A & M (both 24%). [See Table 2]

PROOF: 62% of women on the 10 campuses report that they have been victims of broader sexual harassment or personally know someone who has been. Broader sexual harassment includes remarks that insult because of gender and remarks that are sexually offensive, as well as the more serious forms of sexual harassment defined above. Things are worst at GWU (73%), U. of Nebraska (69%) and OSU (66%); they are better at Barnard (52%).

While I’m not entirely comfortable with the claims of “PROOF” due to the self-selecting nature and general methodology and language of the survey, [and for that matter I have questions about the use of promoting statistics that are going to be very vulnerable to criticism by those who would have you believe that there is no campus rape crisis] it is quite telling that this many women openly admitted to being harassed and assaulted. And it does ring true in terms of everything we do know about college sexual assault. If this gets the subject some more attention, then that’s a good thing.

[Don't forget to vote for SAFER so we can continue our work fighting campus sexual assault]
My Idea

“The fault lies with the females”

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Sarah pointed out a Jezebel entry discussing an article entitled, “The seven deadly sins of the academy,” in which the author, Dr. Terence Kealey, encourages professors to use their female students as eye candy, but not to sleep with them. Oh, also, he decided that an affair between a student and teacher is not an abuse of his power, but rather the female’s fault. Why? She can report him, thus resulting in his dismissal.

This reeks of “she’s-comely-and-womanly-thus-is-evil-and-seduces-men,” my favorite excuse by some men for why they do just about anything, from having affairs to even rape. It also clearly ignores subtle signals (and pressures) that professors can place onto their students without necessarily taking actions that can result in dismissal. The relationship between a student and professor can be extremely nuanced; a lingering glance or a flirtatious tone can be uncomfortable but not provocative enough to call to attention.

I’m not saying that all female students should be absolved of any wrongdoing or sexual interactions with professors, only that this one-sided perspective coming from a faculty member seems absolutely ridiculous. Not only did he think these things and say these things, but he had them published. I remember some of my professors making cracks about the women in the class, and it wasn’t a good feeling. No student wants to feel like their educator doesn’t take them seriously as an academic.

I understand that the tone of the story is not serious, but the following statement was an exceptionally outrageous thing to read coming from the vice-chancellor of a university:

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays.

What kind of university administrator makes that type of joke? If this was said in America, I’d imagine there would be incredible backlash. I’m curious to see if there will be any fallout to this.