www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-macdonald27feb27,0,6130673.story
Subscribe template_bas template_bas BLOWBACK Wrong on rape template_bas template_bas A student activist reacts to an Op-Ed claiming that there is no campus rape crisis.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Submitted by: ezraK 4:36 PM PST, Feb 28, 2008 2 Brava Nora Niedzielski-Eichner for your eloquent and well-researched response to MacDonald's screed. As the Director of Sexual & Domestic Violence Services at the University of Virginia, I am painfully familiar with the damage that groups like NEW have wreaked through their guilt-laden, judgemental attacks on their peers who dare to speak out on the violence in their lives. It's hard enough to overcome the culture of silence that pervades college campuses without the "help" of comments from the employees of right-wing think tanks. Stanford must be proud to count you among their graduate population. Submitted by: Claire N Kaplan, PhD 4:23 PM PST, Feb 28, 2008 3 Thank you for being a voice for those who are too ashamed to speak up. I was raped by my friends boyfriend when I was in college. After the assault I was the perfect picture of emotional stability and had no signs of psychological trauma. For me it was important to pretend like nothing happened so that no one would know. I knew the number and it was important to know that someone was there just in case. he was going to rape me regardless of my actions or appearance.
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