A great deal of attention has been paid to sexual assault problems over this past month. In an editorial published in the Brown Daily Herald on October 11th, Lily Shield ’09 writes, “For a school of our size and with our money, Brown has an appalling lack of resources dedicated to helping sexual assault survivors.” Shield, along with approximately 15 other Brown and RISD students, have formed a Sexual Assault Task Force, “to address the critical need at Brown for comprehensive resources, trained assistance and options for survivors to pursue against assailants.”
In an October 17th letter to the Herald, Interim Vice President for Campus Life, Russell Carey ‘91 MA ‘06, et al, presents the following list of services currently offered by the University to victims: 1) a sexual assault crisis counselor from Psychological Services on call nights and weekends: a psychotherapist trained in responding to the trauma of sexual assault; 2) ongoing sexual assault training for Health Services, Psychological Services and other campus life staff to insure [sic] that we are responding sensitively and knowledgably [sic] to victims of sexual assault; 3) advocates: non-crisis support by staff trained in and experienced with sexual assault issues; 4) the Sexual Assault Advisory Board: administrators and students working together on services; 5) a new web site (http://brown.edu/Student_Services/Support/), a central site to connect students to all resources for sexual assault, sexual harassment and relationship issues; 6) orientation program with nationally renowned and highly rated speaker Katie Koestner; 7) more time during residence hall staff training dedicated to sexual assault; WPC training on abuse in dating relationships; 9) ongoing support of the student group Coalition Against Relationship Abuse, which operates out of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center; 10) support of the student-run Sexual Assault Resource Center by providing space and computer access out of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center; and 11) participation in Ivy Sexual Assault group so we are up-to-date on resources and practices at peer institutions.
Given the continued articles in the Herald and several Sexual Assault Task Force protests around Parents Weekend, these, apparently, are not enough. Brown’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance activists would have us dramatically expand sexual assault resources and training: in an October 29th Herald article, they call for the creation of a full-time staff position to deal with sexual assault cases, a sexual assault resource center, university backing for a peer-led support group for survivors, and a 24-hour on-campus sexual assault hot-line. They are quick to note that one in six women will be sexually assaulted, and that sexual assaults are dramatically underreported to law enforcement officials.
Fighting sexual assault is an easy agenda item for an activist to take up. No right-minded individual likes sexual assault, and it is a fairly straightforward task (as it should be) to find sympathy for victims of sexual assault. When it comes to establishing effective university policy for dealing with sexual assault issues, however, the task becomes markedly more complex.
The first problem is adequately defining sexual assault. It is somewhat strange that in the half-dozen Herald articles on the topic over the past month, Adam Lack ’97.5 has yet to be mentioned. Lack’s case, for those unfamiliar with it, is the pièce de résistance of Brown’s bumbling incompetence with sexual assault issues during the late 1990s. The relevant details of this case are that Lack had sex with Sara Klein ‘99, whom he had met at a party earlier in the evening. Klein had had a great deal to drink, but testimony indicates that she had initiated the sexual encounter, and had a several-hour conversation with Lack.
The next morning, Klein had no memory of what had transpired the previous evening. Lack explained the details, and assured her that a condom had been used. The two then exchanged phone numbers, and headed their separate ways. Several weeks later, after speaking with a female peer counselor, Klein formally accused Lack of having raped her. Lack was then suspended by the University and ordered to seek counseling – penalties that were later overturned in court. In response to these events, students organized a Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CASA), a precursor to today’s sexual assault activists at Brown.
An explosion of news articles around the nation questioned the definition of rape, and the role of the University in dealing with known cases. On January 29, 1997, ABC 20/20 correspondent John Stossel arrived at Brown, and, famously, challenged student protesters to define rape: “To me it’s a man holding a woman at gunpoint or knifepoint,” he said. “There seems to be a new way of looking at it. I’d like some of you to talk to me about it.” According to a May 31, 2004, Herald article, CASA organized a counter-rally to protest Stossel, which “devolved into a shouting match between Stossel and several students, who accused him of manipulating the news.” University administrators and deans began writing letters and making formal statements for and against Lack, essentially involving themselves in student activism – a somewhat amusing circumstance, irrespective of the context.
The exact place that Lack’s case falls on the sexual assault spectrum has never been resolved satisfactorily, despite several attempts to revise Brown’s sexual assault codes. And this is the critical point that must be kept in mind as Brown once again enters deliberations on the subject: sexual assault is, in most instances (i.e., when not concretely rape), a gray area – something that is subjective.
Antioch College’s “Sexual Offense Prevention Policy” is an excellent example of an overzealous and overly liberal attempt to define sexual assault. This policy requires the initiator of sexual intimacy to seek explicit verbal permission at each escalating step of activity. (“May I have your permission to kiss you?”) The policy helpfully adds that the “use of agreed upon forms of communication such as gestures or safe words is acceptable, but must be discussed and verbally agreed to by all parties before sexual activity occurs.” It further stipulates, “All parties must have unimpaired judgment (examples that may cause impairment include but are not limited to alcohol, drugs, mental health conditions, physical health conditions).”
The problem with such policies, if it is not intuitively obvious, is paternalism. Regardless of how well-intentioned it might be, this policy dramatically oversteps normal boundaries in regards to defining acceptable private activity; it speaks to a fundamental lack of trust for individual students to make their own decisions. It also carries the not-so-subtle implication that any intimacy, should it deviate in the slightest from policy, is grounds for a sexual assault case. This, for example, places not asking for permission before a kiss into the same general classification as rape.
This brings us back to the question of sexual assault at Brown. In the editorial cited earlier, Shield suggests that “the ‘hook-up culture,’ coupled with alcohol prevalence and social stigma, succeed fantastically at casting doubt over whether a crime occurred at all, as well as at perpetuating feelings of self-blame and guilt among victims. . . . [S]tudents and administrators alike at this school are reluctant to acknowledge the sobering reality that sexual assault happens here. We are reluctant to acknowledge that the perpetrators are Brown students.”
Certainly, in cases of true and criminal sexual assault, in which one party with malevolent intent forcibly compels another to engage in a sexual act, proper recourse must be taken. At the point when she does suffer physical or psychological trauma, which is certainly plausible, she has recourse to her friends, to psychological and health services, to the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, and to the dozens of Women’s Peer Counselors on campus. If in the opinion of any of these individuals a criminal offense was committed, the student has recourse to the law. Is this truly not enough? Tell a feminist that a woman is not capable of handling her own problems, and you will get a nice slap across the face. And yet, that seems to be exactly what our friends in the sexual assault task-force argue.
A second issue is the culture of victimization that ever-present concerns about sexual assault beget. Ubiquitous reminders about the danger of sexual assault, repeated contacts from university officials about sexual assault resources, and a large number of dedicated facilities related to sexual assault would coalesce into a false impression that every woman at Brown is at immediate risk of being raped. As any medical student will tell you, exposure to a list of ailments leads one very easily to self-diagnose with a problem that one does not truly have. Likewise, as we saw in the case of Adam Lack, ambiguous cases resulting from individual foolishness can be interpreted in any number of directions; why should we encourage individuals to interpret these as rape, rather than as personal folly from which one should learn a lesson? I have great sympathy for a woman who is forced upon, violated, or otherwise assaulted against her will. However, I have little sympathy for a woman who dresses in revealing clothes, drinks beyond her capacity, and then proceeds to a fraternity party and has sex that she will later feel guilty about.
I am truly sorry for those who have suffered from sexual assault; my arguments here are in no way intended to diminish what they have and will continue to go through. On the contrary, I believe that as our community reassesses the manner in which it responds to sexual assault, it must do so specifically with these victims in mind. If the expanded resources suggested by the Sexual Assault Task Force would truly benefit victims of sexual assault, in a manner not possible with the current system, then so be it. Let’s make it happen. However, embracing such proposals as an empty gesture does little more than guarantee that real victims will suffer through association with blind ideology, ambiguity, and political correctness. We cannot allow ourselves to diminish sexual assault by inventing it where it does not exist, or by expanding the definition to the point where it is meaningless. During the Adam Lack conflagration, those who questioned the manner in which sexual assault was construed were dismissed as misogynists. At the point where such questioning is not allowed, imagined problems will be over-reified, to the detriment of everyone. Crusaders against sexual assault would do well to be wary of going too far, for the good of their cause.
