http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-macdonald27feb27,0,6130673.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BLOWBACK
Wrong on rape
A student activist reacts to an Op-Ed claiming that there is no campus rape crisis.
By Nora Niedzielski-Eichner
February 27, 2008
I was appalled this Sunday to see the headline "
What campus rape crisis?"
pop up on my newsfeed, especially when I realized it came from a major
news source. I am grateful to The Times for the opportunity to respond
to Heather MacDonald's rehash of author Katie Roiphe's
discredited attacks
on studies of rape on college campuses, although I question why such an
outdated and deliberately misleading piece was published in the first
place.
To refute MacDonald's claims, I could dwell on her right-wing think tank
credentials and the ideological biases that come with
such funding sources. I could cite
peer-reviewed academic sources,
anecdotal student survivor sources or Department of Justice
statistics, [pdf] all of which demonstrate that sexual assault is a common occurrence on college campuses. I could link to
dozens of
articles from the last month alone detailing students raped by
friends,
Resident assistants and
ex-boyfriends.
But MacDonald clearly does not care about such evidence, and my real
concern is not with her. Instead, I want to reach out to the survivors,
students, parents, administrators and lawmakers who might have read her
opinion and been misled by her distortions and circular logic, and I
want to discuss what is really happening on college campuses, from the
perspective of those who graduated recently or are there now.
MacDonald gives herself away halfway through the article with her
reference to what "students in the '60s demanded." Apparently she is
still fighting old battles, and her fear of women who drink, have sex
and have orgasms is out of touch with the reality of young men and
women today. Certainly there are problems with sex on college campuses,
but I don't think the solution is, as MacDonald seems to suggest, a
return to the days when "fraternization" was prohibited by college
administrations. (Just look at the recent statistics on
rapes in the U.S. military and
at military academies, which do have strict rules about fraternization.)
Along with MacDonald's deep distrust of female sexuality, her
lack of respect for men
[pdf] is evident in her obsession with women's actions, because the
only excuse for focusing on the victim and not the perpetrator would be
a belief that men are unable to control their behavior. But is that
really a tenable position on which to base school policies or our
lives? Most men are not rapists, and I believe that all men are capable
of being responsible for their actions. I also believe fewer men would
be rapists with better guidance on the definition of consensual sex and
a decrease in the kind of victim-blaming in which people like MacDonald
engage.
So what are the problems with sex and rape on college campuses? The
biggest is many students' lack of a clear understanding of the
difference between the two. Students today are being inundated by two
contradictory cultures, neither of them healthy. On the one hand, we
have the continual commodification of sex in America. Women's bodies
are everywhere, selling cars, movies and pop stars in increasingly
explicit terms, but with little focus on mutuality, emotions,
knowledge, conversation or consent. On the other hand, we have
abstinence-only education and MacDonald-like calls for chastity, which
also focus very little on mutuality, emotions, knowledge, conversation
or consent. So when it comes to an in-person sexual interaction between
two students with these two cultures to draw on, is it any surprise
that some men are picking the elements that justify forcing a woman to
have sex or that some women are confused about what happened to them
and whose fault it is? In all of America's high-volume arguing about
sex these days, why aren't more people simply teaching our students to
talk to each other, honestly and openly, before having sex?
In 2002,
fewer than half
of colleges and universities had sexual assault prevention programs,
and the programs that did exist could have been as basic as a skit
during orientation that half the freshmen slept through. This is an
unacceptable failure to put resources into prevention, given the
prevalence of sexual assault on campus. And sexual assault is a problem
no matter what numbers you use - did MacDonald really mean to imply
that rape isn't a problem if it is only impacting one woman or two
women or 10 women a month per campus? Multiply out those numbers, and
I'd say that's a pretty big problem.
The services available to survivors are often
not much more extensive.
Every week, the organization I work with, Students Active for Ending
Rape, hears from students who feel re-victimized by the lack of
services or by administrators who did not believe their accounts or
blamed them for their assaults.
I work with SAFER because I feel that the voices that need to be heard
are those of students, not those of writers bankrolled by conservative
think tanks. Students are the ones surviving assault and committing
assault, and colleges and universities need to turn their attention to
what students want and need in terms of prevention programs, survivor
services and disciplinary proceedings. The answers will be different
for each campus, as each campus has a different culture and different
students. The solution to the rape crisis on campus can only come from
active responses to what college students say they need today, not from
conservative ideologues 30 years out of college repeating tired
stereotypes from their desks at the Manhattan Institute.
Nora Niedzielski-Eichner is a board member of Students Active for Ending Rape and a graduate student at Stanford University.