College administrators have known about the campus rape problem for three decades, and they have been mandated to address it for two decades, why has so little been done? The answer is failed presidential leadership. Karen Barnett first documented the campus rape problem in her 1982 article “Date Rape” in Ms. magazine, and Ms. published… Continue reading Thirty Years of Failed Presidential Leadership on Campus Rape
Tag: campus rape
Campus Rape: Why Not Law Enforcement?
Co-authored with Baillee Brown. Cross-posted at Ms. Blog. There’s one question about campus rape that comes up again and again: Why isn’t the crime handled exclusively by law enforcement? In a perfect world, the legal system would effectively arbitrate this crime, but given law enforcement’s dismal record on sex crimes, schools have no choice but… Continue reading Campus Rape: Why Not Law Enforcement?
Campus Rape: Why Colleges Won’t (Really) Address Rape Culture
By Caroline Heldman and Baillee Brown, crossposted at Ms. Blog. One in five women and 6 percent of men will face sexual assault/rape during their time in college. But no college in the U.S. has come up with a plan to effectively shift rape culture on their campus. It’s not an impossible task, but it is… Continue reading Campus Rape: Why Colleges Won’t (Really) Address Rape Culture
Campus Rape: Reporters and Rape Myths
Crossposted at Ms. Blog. Bloomberg News took the campus sexual assault backlash to a new low last week with a piece describing how “hook-up culture” is on the decline at elite colleges now that there’s a heightened awareness of sexual assault on campuses. The focus of the article is the “burden” male students carry as a result of new… Continue reading Campus Rape: Reporters and Rape Myths
Campus Rape: The Second Wave of the Backlash Against Anti-Rape Activism
Much like the backlash of the 1980s and ’90s, today’s rape apologia comes in four distinct, but interconnected, forms: denying the problem exists, blaming the victim, vilifying whistleblowers and turning perpetrators into victims. Below, we outline the ways in which conservative backlashers are attempting to undermine the work of anti-rape activists—and, thankfully, how they’re failing.
Campus Rape: A Brief History of Sexual Violence Activism in the U.S.
The new campus anti-rape movement is the latest effort in a longstanding struggle against sexual violence in the U.S. that African-American women initiated more than a century ago.
Campus Rape: Why Parents Should Send their College-Bound Daughters and Sons to “the 55”
The ED’s list of schools is not a “worst offenders” list. It is a list of schools where survivors are more active and vocal.
Retracting the Retraction: Occidental College, The Los Angeles Times, and the Firing of Jason Felch
The Los Angeles Times did not perform due diligence in their investigation of the numbers, and they never should have issued a retraction. Felch had incontrovertible evidence that the College did not include anonymous cases in their 2012 ASR and had verification that the college could not lawfully account for 27 missing cases.
By Caroline Heldman & Danielle Dirks
On October 15, Slate Dear Prudence advice columnist Emily Yoffe wrote a piece titled, “The Best Rape Prevention: Tell College Women to Stop Getting Drunk.” A crowd of critics harpooned Yoffe for her victim blaming approach (Jezebel, Feministing, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, and even Slate’s own Amanda Hess). On October 18, Yoffe responded to the backlash by digging in her heels, citing data on the correlation between survivor intoxication and rape and admonishing her critics for silencing those who want to give “practical advice” to young women. Just last week, Southern Methodist University student Kirby Wiley penned a similar piece in the school newspaper encouraging women to drink less, writing that, “of course the perpetrators are the one’s responsible for the crimes, but to solve the problem they can’t be the only ones taking blame.”
Beyond the implied victim blaming in Yoffe’s pieces and the blatant victim blaming in Wiley’s piece (rape is the only crime where the victim is put on trial), both of these authors are terribly misguided in thinking that they are offering practical advice. The fact is, rape reduction tips for potential victims are just not effective. (Only perpetrator and bystander interventions have shown some effectiveness.) The idea that sexual assault survivors could have controlled the criminal actions of others reflects a profound misunderstanding of how perpetrators operate.
The reality is that campus rapists’ principal weapon is alcohol and they are able to hide in plain sight within a male-dominated party culture where men provide the venues, parties, and drinks to women, often with the explicit purpose of hooking up.
While the vast majority of rapists are men, the vast majority of men are not rapists and cannot identify with rapists’ mindsets. Research shows that rapists exhibit high levels of hypermasculinity and anger toward women, they need to dominate women, and lack empathy, including sex offenders on campus. Dr. David Lisak’s research on undetected rapists finds that just 4% of young men on campus are the serial rapists who commit nine out of ten rapes on college campuses, with an average of six rapes over the course of their college career. According to Lisak, undetected college rapists:
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use ‘instrumental’ not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.
Virtually all rapes on campus are perpetrated by these calculating criminals, but despite this evidence, many people continue to blame alcohol for rape rather than rapists. These same people likely have a difficult time imagining the profile of a white, well-heeled, and college-educated sex offender who is not only cold, but calculating in seeking out his victims. Lastly, these individuals tend to ignore the overwhelming data that rapists rape sober women too.
When people like Yoffe and Wiley blame alcohol rather than rapists, they make it easier for rapists to hide (and continue) their crimes by perpetuating the idea that rape on college campuses is simply an alcohol-fueled miscommunication.
In fact, Yoffe and Wiley are mirroring the same bogus “blame it on the alcohol” rationales that two-thirds of college rapists use themselves to excuse their acts of forced sex! Perpetuating a national discourse that blames alcohol for rape simply emboldens college rapists to continue to use their weapon of choice – alcohol – with full license and with impunity.
Such misguided voices also serve to intensify women’s self-blame and nearly guarantee women’s silence in the aftermath of rape. This intense self-blame makes women less likely to:
• confide in friends or loved ones;
• seek much-needed professional assistance; and
• report their rapes to law enforcement or their schools – perhaps the most effective way to expose and prevent the 4% of mostly undetected college rapists from raping again.
In short, messages to women that blame them for their rape rather than the criminal perpetrators function as a silencing machine that enables rape to remain a mostly hidden national epidemic.
Beyond the damage inflicted by Yoffe and Wiley’s victim blaming, their argument is also logically flawed. As any student in an introductory statistics course can recite, “correlation does not equal causation,” so a correlation between intoxication and rape does not mean intoxication causes rape. In fact, nearly all college students consume alcohol, just under 40% are heavy drinkers, and male students drink more often and more heavily than female students. Logically, then, if victim intoxication were a primary cause of rape, then men would be raped more often than women, but they are not. So untangling Yoffe and Wiley’s “logic,” drinking isn’t the problem: being female and drinking is the problem. The implication is that women should not be allowed to participate in campus party culture (or their everyday lives) without paying the penalty of rape.
So why, in 2013, are writers for prominent publications still engaging in barefaced victim blaming when it comes to rape? We believe that the lion’s share of blame lies with editors. When news sources publish a piece on Syria of the growth of job in the high tech industry, editors call upon experts, typically with advanced degrees, who have been thinking and writing about their subject for years. But when it comes to incredibly complex gender issues like sexualized violence, editors too often engage in outdated identity politics and assign stories to the nearest available woman. This is how we get mainstream “news” stories about gender issues from veritable laypeople, like Yoffe or Hanna Rosin or Caroline Kitchens, who have not spent a sustained period of time reading, researching, and writing about gender, and don’t bother to use the work of those who have. Having collectively spent three decades doing just that, we have learned that gender is a remarkably intricate system of power that takes decades to gain even a slim grasp on how it functions and operates. Our society will remain in the Neanderthal cave in our common “knowledge” about rape as long as uninformed public figures continue to recycle inaccurate, sexist myths packaged as “helpful” advice.
