Hickey: We still blame rape victims and we still don't really get why that's bad - University of Pittsburgh The Pitt News

Hickey: We still blame rape victims and we still don't really get why that's bad

Created on Tuesday, 15 January 2013 03:29 Written by Tracey Hickey / Columnist

Students gathered to call attention to sexual assaults on campuses at Take Back the Night. Collin Flanagan / For the Pitt NewsLizzy Seeberg, a freshman at St. Mary's College, committed suicide two years ago after her allegations of violent rape by a Notre Dame football player made her the target of threats from other students. The player accused of assaulting her is still on the roster alongside a teammate implicated in another rape case, whose victim cites Seeberg as a cautionary tale for why she won't come forward. 

 

Last semester, Amherst College came under scrutiny when a former student wrote that school officials refused to take her rape accusations seriously, then institutionalized her when she complained of suicidal thoughts. A few weeks ago, a young man from Ohio State posted a video boasting that his friends, many of them athletes at Steubenville High School, were raping an unconscious girl in the next room. Two of the accused have been arrested, but most of the students implicated are not facing charges, and Steubenville's assistant coach Nate Hubbard told The New York Times that the victim made up the rape as an "excuse" for a night of drunken bad behavior.

 

In the wake of these events, we should all be asking: Could this happen at Pitt? And if it did, would we know about it?

 

Bella Salamone, sexual assault peer educator and president of Campus Women's Organization, told demonstrators during the Take Back The Night rally in October that 42 times a year, or about once every week, someone at Pitt says that he or she has been raped. But Pitt's annual crime report lists only 12 incidents of rape in 2011. That's a wide discrepancy, but not an unusual one. Colleges and universities are required by law to report sexual assault statistics, but "data analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity shows that there is a wide discrepancy between the official numbers universities report and the numbers seen by campus and community sexual assault counseling centers or other places victims seek help," according to an article by InvestigateWest.

 

Assaults reported to mental health professionals only become part of a school's official records if the victim decides to report them to the campus police or judicial board. In many cases, the desire to keep reported numbers of sexual assault low — after all, a hefty rape figure can scare away prospective students — leads schools to pressure victims not to go to the police, and to settle their cases "in-house" through a student conduct hearing. That charge hasn't been leveled at Pitt, but the cases above should give you an idea of how common it is.

 

In less sinister cases, victims don't go to the police because it simply doesn't seem worth it. Although reporting rape or sexual assault is often framed as a matter of "if you don't report it, he might do it again," the fact is that only 10 percent of reported rapes — and most rapes aren't reported — result in the assailant spending at least one day in prison. For those who are convicted and incarcerated, the average amount of time spent in jail is a little more than five years, a sentence comparable to a drug offense. With all that in mind, I don't blame victims for not reporting assaults.

 

When we do talk about rape on college campuses, we mostly talk about it as a reason why women shouldn't party. During my freshman orientation in 2009, we watched a series of skits about the hazards of college life, and one depicted a woman telling a friend that she was assaulted, but there was no mention of campus judicial processes, Sexual Assault Services or Pittsburgh Action Against Rape and no information on how to file a police complaint, request a rape kit or even access emergency contraception. Failing as it did to teach students what to do if they or a friend were victimized, the skit only functioned as an ominous warning. "Don't let this happen to you."

 

Victim-focused prevention initiatives are often billed as the "realistic" approach, an alternative to being all kumbaya and telling women that preventing rape isn't their responsibility — the latter supposedly leading women to take chances. But overwhelmingly, these approaches don't help. Because their message to students is "don't get raped," the message to those who do get raped is "you screwed up" — whether or not that is the intention. 

 

When we do talk to men about rape and consent — and to our credit, we do; Sexual Assault Services' education programs are mandatory for fraternities and sororities, though perhaps those programs should be expanded to more of the student body — we often make the mistake of directing those efforts at preventing the mythical, would-be "accidental rapist." Despite the popular idea that perpetrator-targeted anti-rape efforts mostly work to enlighten men who just didn't know that a woman who is passed-out drunk can't give her consent to have sex, studies in criminal behavior suggest that most men instinctively know that — and the ones who are raping passed-out girls anyway have very much the same thought process as the attackers who jump out of the bushes. 

 

False accusations of rape are actually very rare. Rapists single out drunk girls specifically because they're easy to discredit. Someone saying,"I didn't hear her say no," is probably not telling you the truth. Teaching students these real facts about rape would go a long way toward preventing the sort of victim-blaming fiasco that we saw at Notre Dame. 

 

But our resources are limited. We have only one full-time sexual assault response and education coordinator, Sexual Assault Services director Mary Koch Ruiz, who supervises peer educators, provides individual and group therapy to sexual assault survivors, and responds to emergencies called in to the Pitt police. There is only one therapy group for survivors of sexual assault at Pitt, and it is off-limits to men. As much as Pitt cares about keeping students safe, much of how we approach rape prevention here is incomplete or inconsistent with what we know about sexual assault. 

 

The first step is admitting you have a problem. Universities all across America have a major rape problem, and Pitt — like every major university that's been fortunate enough not to have a major rape scandal yet — needs to seriously evaluate how we approach sexual assault on campus so we don't end up in the headlines next.

 

Write Tracey at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .