The media maelstrom surrounding Rolling Stone‘s in-depth report on rape on college campuses, which centered around a woman’s horrific account of being gang-raped for three hours by a group of fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia, has troubled me on many levels.
Since the story made national headlines and resulted in UVA suspending all fraternity activities, the magazine has released a series of letters apologizing for misplacing their trust in the woman (“Jackie”), whose account may have been faulty. Jackie has gone from an emblem of college rape victims to the poster girl for women who lie about rape, as if the problem of rape isn’t a problem at all, but a plot whipped up by angry feminists to make men feel badly about their sexuality. (I’ve already addressed why this image of a feminist is misguided.)
As the father of a young boy, this story has me thinking hard, yet again, about whether my wife and I are doing everything we can to raise a responsible, caring, respectful young man. It also rekindled painful memories from college that, like an old injury, still ache after all these years.
At the end of my freshman year in college, my roommate raped a girl who lived down the hall in our dorm. That sentence makes the situation sound straightforward; in reality, it was anything but.
The girl was a friend of mine — I’m going to call her Mary (not her real name). My roommate, whom I’ll call Ed (again, not his real name), had an on-again/off-again relationship with her. It was more like friends with occasional benefits. They liked one another and found one another attractive but never managed to have a stable romantic relationship. I don’t know why, really. Maybe because they were teenagers in college, fickle and busy with a million other things.
Late in the semester, Ed purchased two hits of acid to celebrate finishing his finals. When his exams were through, I found him in our room with Mary, about to drop the tabs. He stopped me near the door and asked if I could crash someplace else for the night. “I’d really appreciate it,” he said. He gave me a loaded look — eyebrows raised, lips curled in a proud little smirk — like “You know what’s gonna happen! Bow chicka wow wow.”
I didn’t return to my room till late next morning. Ed ambled about, packing his stuff, getting ready to go home for summer vacation. He gave me a muted hello, only glancing in my direction. I thought he might crow about the night before, but he didn’t offer many details other than “It was fun.” I wrote his silence off to him being hungover, if that’s even the right term for someone who just dropped acid.
When I left to hit the bathroom, I found Mary’s best girlfriend poking her head out of the door to Mary’s room. She pulled me inside, where it was dark, the curtains drawn. Mary sat sobbing on her bed. She said that Ed “forced” himself on her. Her friend (who was a friend of Ed’s too) tried to calm her down, but I wanted to know specifically what had happened. Mary explained that Ed forced himself on her sexually, that they had intercourse even though she said no. I asked her to clarify: “Are you sure you didn’t just think no? Are you sure you actually said it out loud?”
Yes, she assured me she said it, she wasn’t that out of it. “And are you certain you said it so he could hear you?” I asked.
“I tried pushing him away,” she said. “I said ‘no, no, no …’ He was right there, on top of me. He had to hear.” She was crying now, and shaking. Her friend rubbed her back and shushed her.
“Ed raped you,” I said. I practically whispered it, it felt like such an evil, big thing to say out loud. “We’ve got to do something. Tell someone. Call security, or the clinic, or the dorm coordinator.”
But Mary shook her head no. She said that since she was on a hallucinogenic drug, no one would believe her, and besides, she didn’t want her parents to know she took acid.
We kept talking about it, but our conversation went in circles. It would be his word against hers, she said. People would blame her for making a bad decision. Again she repeated the word no. No, she wouldn’t tell anyone. No, she didn’t need to see a doctor. No, it wasn’t a big deal. Yet obviously she was upset.
I left the room unsettled. I liked my roommate. We were friends. And yet I wasn’t surprised. More than a few times his attitudes toward women creeped me out; the way he talked about them in a hyper-sexualized way, obsessing over girls that he hardly knew, leaving them notes and things. His courtship techniques crossed into stalker territory. In his diary, I found page upon page of the f-word written over and over again. (Yes, I snooped.) He kept a gruesome poster over his bed of a naked woman pierced by hundreds of needles. He was weird, sure. But a rapist? How could I have slept in the same room as a rapist, talked with him for hours and hours, and not spotted that? What was wrong with me that Ed’s behavior wouldn’t raise any alarm bells?
Back in my dorm room, I found him still packing his things. I went to the window and stared out at the overcast sky. My parents were coming that night to pick me up, and I couldn’t wait. But what should I do now? Fight the guy for hurting my friend? I certainly wanted to hit him. “What the hell happened last night?” I finally said.
He sighed and kind of shrugged. “Things got weird …”
He trailed off and wouldn’t elaborate, which, compared to the upset girl a few doors down, spoke volumes. I left, furious with him and with myself for not knowing what to do. When I returned I told him he had to leave, and I would do whatever I could to get him out of there as quickly as possible. I’ll never forget watching his little car pull away from the curb, loaded with clothes and things he didn’t have time to properly put into boxes.
That summer, I visited Mary at her home, and over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory she cried about the situation, but still insisted she didn’t want to press charges. The next semester, her new boyfriend confronted me. Mary had told him about the rape, and he wanted to know why I didn’t do more. How I could just let this rapist walk around on campus as if nothing had happened? I was putting other women at risk.
“What could I do?” I said. “Isn’t it up to Mary?”
I felt helpless and weak. Mary’s boyfriend and I discussed writing a letter to the newspaper about Ed, or ratting him out to campus security ourselves, but after a few heated discussions, the boyfriend backed down too, at Mary’s insistence. She wanted to put the incident behind her.
This story is not unusual. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) says that statistics about sexual assault and rape on college campuses are unclear as a result of under-reporting like the one I describe. According to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 60% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, and 97% of rapists don’t spend even a day in jail. Young women don’t speak up especially when drugs and alcohol are involved, in part because they feel somewhat responsible for the incident or are unsure what exactly happened.
The rape culture in our country and on our college campuses is not a conspiracy, a myth, or a fabrication. A conservative survey by the NIJ found that 3% of all college women became victims of rape or attempted rape during the course of a nine-month school year. That seems small, but if you’re talking about a campus with 10,000 young women, then 300 of them are victimized per academic year. Other surveys put this number much higher – between 18 and 20% of all college women.
Our children begin to ask questions about sex, sexuality, and how they treat one another in a romantic context at an incredibly young age. It is not unusual to hear kindergarteners or first-graders talking about having “boyfriends” or “girlfriends,” in part because of an outdated and unenlightened notion that men and women can’t be just friends.
As our kids get older, they turn to the Internet to learn about sex, and what do they find? Pornography that depicts men as caring only about the pleasure that comes with sexually dominating a woman, and women who will do anything, even humiliate or engage in painful acts, to please their partners. Many of these scenarios strip both parties of their human dignity, forcing them into restrictive, silent roles. Sexual violence is portrayed as kinky and fun, and women especially are treated as nothing more than objects of pleasure. This is a real cultural phenomenon, and it is one that as parents we need to directly address and combat.
We need to talk to our children about how to treat one another with respect in romantic relationships. We need to let our sons know that it is never appropriate to violate a woman’s space; no means no. We need to let our daughters know that we will support them whatever has happened, that we will believe them when they say they have been assaulted or raped, and that it is not their fault. Too many women, like Mary, have swallowed the pain of sexual trauma. Too many men, like Ed, don’t face justice, or experience any consequences for their heinous actions. Parents are on the front lines here. Please, don’t foster a culture of silence around rape by not speaking about it to your adolescent and teenage children. A healthy dialogue must start with us.
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