As demonstrated by the current #metoo movement on social media, the words you use when speaking about sexual assault can have an impact on what behavior others view as unacceptable. In an effort to stay woke, here are three ways to reframe how you talk about sexual assault.
“I BELIEVE YOU”
When Liz Peralta, 24, was 6 years old, she says a man raped her. Beyond the actual assault itself, Peralta tells NationSwell that the biggest challenge was getting over how her mother seemed to blame her for what happened. “Up until I was 17 I felt like it was my fault. And I remember my mom — she didn’t intentionally mean it — but her reaction was, ‘How could you do this?’” Peralta says. “I felt like I did this terrible thing, but I was 6. To be scared and to feel alone, those words definitely resonated with me.” The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network also suggests using other supportive, sensitive phrases, like “You didn’t do anything to deserve this,” “It took a lot of courage to share this with me,” or “You are not alone.” Giving an empathetic response can be challenging to some. That’s because your reply can have less to do with believing whether or not an assault happened and more to do with how you were raised. A 2016 study found that those who place a higher value on obedience and loyalty are more likely to believe survivors of assault. But those who hold general welfare in higher regard place blame on the assailants.
“HE ASSAULTED HER”
“Animal Farm” and “1984” author George Orwell famously declared, “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” Grammatically speaking, it’s more effective to use an active voice than a passive one. (In other words, say someone did something to someone rather than someone experienced a something by a someone.) But how does that play into discussions about sexual assault? “We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women,” says Jackson Katz, activist and founder of MVP Strategies (which provides gender violence prevention education and leadership training) whose quote from a TED Talk last year is currently making the rounds online. “You can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. [It] shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women.” In 2001, University of Kent sociology professor Gerd Bohner published research on the use of passive voice when describing sexual assaults in the British Journal of Psychology. His findings? Those who read passive voice headlines are less likely to hold assailants culpable.
“WHEN A WOMAN SAYS NO, I WILL STOP #HOWIWILLCHANGE”
Men can share how they will act appropriately and be allies to assault survivors by using the hashtag #HowIWillChange.
Guys, it’s our turn.
After yesterday’s endless #MeToo stories of women being abused, assaulted and harassed, today we say #HowIWillChange.
— Benjamin Law 🌈 (@mrbenjaminlaw) October 16, 2017
Adding male voices to the discussion about sexual assault is particularly powerful, considering that up to 30 percent of men don’t believe that rape exists,according to a study published by the University of North Dakota’s Counseling Psychology and Community Services department.
Before Sandra Scott left home for college, her mother asked her to take a self-defense class — just in case she “encountered a situation where someone wanted to hurt” her. The 19-year-old Stanford University freshman from New Port Richey, Fla., did some research but never got around to signing up. When she got to Palo Alto, Calif., the sun-splashed campus seemed perfectly safe. Yet, when her resident assistant mentioned a new, student-run self-defense seminar starting the next quarter, Scott enrolled in it — partly out of a sense of obligation to her mom. In the company of 15 females, Scott says the class’s candid discussions opened her eyes to a different reality at the college.
“I had generally felt safe on campus. … I wasn’t exposed to anything — or to that much — but hearing from other women and how it had affected them, I realized sexual assault is a problem at Stanford,” Scott tells NationSwell. After taking the nine-week class, “I don’t know if I would say that I feel safer, but I definitely feel less naïve.”
Current student Daly Montgomery, a senior double majoring in aeronautics and African-American studies and rugby player, created “Protecting Your Bubble,” a self-defense course to empower female classmates to protect themselves. The class provides context about the prevalence and psychology for campus rape at large, explains the response systems in place at Stanford and teaches physical techniques to disable an attacker. Montgomery stresses that most participants probably won’t ever have to, say, knee a guy in the groin or scratch him, but that’s not the point. Rather, it encourages a woman to define her personal space — aka, her “bubble” — and to assert herself and feel she has the strength to back it up when someone tries to violate it. (In previous sessions, Montgomery also taught men and gender-nonconforming students.)
“If you are feeling unsafe, you are allowed to do something,” Montgomery tells her students. “That’s something they haven’t heard before. I realized through the class how important that was and how it’s not really emphasized anywhere else,” she says. “Much of what I aimed to do in my class was empower my students to realize they know more than they might think.” In both 2013 and 2014, 26 Stanford students experienced a forcible sexual offense.
As universities across the country revamp their sexual assault prevention education to comply with federal law, self-defense classes often aren’t included — despite strong evidence proving their efficacy. This student-led class at Stanford adds a new dimension to prevention on a campus that’s struggled with sexual violence.
In 2013, according to campus crime statistics made public by the Clery Act, the university disclosed that 26 students experienced a forcible sexual offense — equal to the total number of robberies, aggravated assaults and car thefts on campus, combined. (In 2014, the most recent year available, Stanford students reported another 26 rapes and four cases of fondling.)
Clery Act data can be problematic: A comparably high number of reports may be evidence that a school has created an environment where reporting is encouraged, rather than hushed up. (Or, it could indicate a real problem.) Conversely, a low number could underrepresent the number of criminal acts. An official campus climate survey at Stanford in 2015 suggests the former: 6.5 percent of female undergraduate seniors reported being raped, and 36.8 percent reported sexual misconduct.
Led by the provost and philosophy professor John W. Etchemendy, Stanford’s administration responded to the violence and student outcry by overhauling the school’s reporting process for rape survivors and by mandating students take an online module about “upstander” (Stanford’s preferred term for bystander) intervention before they arrive on the palm tree-lined campus. The majority of the 11 students NationSwell interviewed at length over a four-day visit to campus this January, however, felt Etchemendy’s response did too little too late. (A Stanford spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, denied several requests for interviews.) During a rally in 2014, Stanford students demand better protections for victims of sexual assault.
In response, student-led initiatives, including “Protecting Your Bubble,” began popping up across campus, centering their discussions on Stanford specifically. In Montgomery’s class, Scott says that hearing anecdotes from upperclassmen made sexual violence real for the first time, in a way completing the online course “from home on a computer” had not. Students in the course picked one session as their favorite: the fifth week’s module on “sticky situations.” In it, the group brainstorms hypothetical situations when someone else’s actions would make them uncomfortable (someone follows you home or touches you on a plane ride or public transit). In pairs, the girls act out how they would respond.
Thinking over a solution to each hypothetical dilemma made junior Esther Fan Melton realize that “self-defense is not about the other person, it’s about me and protecting my space.” Lex Schoenberg, one of Montgomery’s rugby teammates who took the class, echoes her, saying, “I think the most important lesson I’ll take with me is that I don’t have to feel powerless in uncomfortable or threatening situations.” She continues, “I now feel more confident in my ability to recognize and get out of certain sticky situations before they escalate too far.”
Schoenberg’s sense of empowerment aligns with clinical research on self-defense classes. A review of empirical studies shows that women who forcefully resist are more likely to prevent a perpetrator from completing a rape. In the past two years, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and one conducted by the University of Oregon found that a seminar-based university course like Montgomery’s could effectively reduce rates of sexual assault. With college campuses full of sexually active, young people, “there’s lots of opportunities for hooking up and partying,” says Martha McCaughey, sociology professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C, and author of “Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense.” In that environment, “there is certainly a need for both sex ed and rape prevention education on campus,” including self-defense training.
Despite these results, self-defense itself remains a sticky situation, hemmed in by opposition from all sides of the ideological divide, McCaughey says. Offering self-defense classes seems to be a natural fit, so why are they excluded? Some feminists take issue with placing moral responsibility on women to fight off an attacker, rather than on the perpetrator himself, while other left-leaners emphasize a nonviolent approach. And then there’s the group of gender traditionalists who contend women aren’t strong enough to defend themselves (or don’t want them to be), perpetuating a damsel-in-distress narrative that underlies some bystander intervention trainings, adds McCaughey, who also runs the blog See Jane Fight Back.
Those concerns quickly fade away with properly designed classes that empower women, like “Protecting Your Bubble,” which situates self-defense strategies within a broader look at the forces that either facilitate or discourage sexual violence. Interestingly, both its instructor and its students also report wanting to participate in the larger movement to change Stanford’s policies and procedures. When NationSwell first spoke to Montgomery in January, she noted that she hadn’t been “hugely involved in the broader campus response, just my little piece of it with my class.” But three months later, halfway into her second quarter of teaching, Montgomery says she feels more invested. “Before, I would say, I felt kind of disconnected from the overall activism. Teaching the class made me realize I have a very real stake in this — this is something I can contribute — and I’m more interested in trying to fit my portion into the overall movement.” Kaelyn Varner, a junior studying the intersection of science, technology and society echoes her sentiments. “I feel like I finally have knowledge and a platform to speak from.”
Graduation is only one week away for Montgomery. She doesn’t know who, if anyone, will take her spot leading “Protecting Your Bubble” next year — a perpetual problem in the four-year cycles of campus activism. (SARA, the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse, Stanford’s direct services for survivors, has asked Montgomery to develop programming they could teach.) Effective methods to promote self-defense are clearly in place; it’s up to underclassmen or the university to see that the benefits reach future students. MORE:This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
When selecting a college from which to announce a new sexual assault awareness campaign in 2011, the White House had an easy choice. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan both arrived in Durham, N.H., the New England town that’s home to the University of New Hampshire’s flagship campus, to kick off Not Alone. The year prior, Biden hosted three UNH professors for a reception at his Delaware home, and in a 42-minute speech on campus, the former senator praised them for their work: “You guys are doing it right. You’re the model for the country,” said Biden, who introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990. “I wish all colleges had a little more UNH Wildcat in them.”
Renowned among policy wonks and feminists alike for its bystander intervention program, its research institute on violence against women and its independently-funded rape prevention and crisis center, UNH is an undisputed leader in ending sexual assault on campus. But this public school with 12,500 undergrads wasn’t always ahead of the curve. In February 1987, three upperclassmen repeatedly had sex with an intoxicated freshman female in her dorm, Stoke Hall — a story that matches contemporary accounts about rapes at the University of Montana at Missoula, Florida State University and many more schools. What’s different about UNH is that faculty and students responded to that crisis as an opportunity to eradicate sexual violence. As a result, it’s a standout amongst institutions of higher learning.
Over three bitterly cold days this February, exactly 29 years after the Stoke Hall incident, NationSwell spoke with Wildcats on campus about what encourages UNH students to intervene if a sexual assault looks imminent. Both students and faculty report that, over time, the gradual changes to campus culture snowballed into a strong ethic of condemning rape when classmates notice its signs. But UNH still isn’t satisfied with those results, citing the 23 students who reported being raped in 2014, according to federal data. To maintain its reputation as a leader, the school continues to better its campus-wide outreach to prevent sexual assault.
With, as of now, 175 open federal investigations into colleges’ compliance with Title IX (the federal law on gender discrimination), universities nationwide are introducing speeches that read like disclaimers, lengthy consent policies and online sex ed courses — many developed by a cottage industry to keep schools in compliance with the law. These additions may stave off government investigators, but they haven’t necessarily been proven to keep students safe, says Jane Stapleton, co-director of UNH’s Prevention Innovations Research Center (PIRC) which studies ways to end gender-based violence, including sexual assault, relationship abuse and stalking, and is located on the college’s campus. At UNH, “we don’t subscribe to that. That is not what we’re about,” she declares; instead, the school has developed evidence-based solutions that are proven to stop rape. “Whenever someone says [their prevention education is] evidence-based, I say, ‘Show me the evidence,” Stapleton adds. “Let’s see the studies.” SHARPP’s “tabling on the go” takes its program message of “Wildcats get consent” out onto campus.
Stapleton emphasizes results because she’s seen the ugly damage sexual assault can do. In 1987, as a graduate student in sociology, she watched the Stoke Hall incident unfold in the press and a public tribunal held over four evenings in a 170-seat lecture hall. At the open hearing, all three men were cleared of sexual assault charges. (Two of the three were suspended for six months on related charges, and both later pled guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault in criminal court.) After the university’s decision, vocal confrontations broke out on the wooded, snow-carpeted campus, including a mass of protestors forcefully occupying the dean’s office, hanging a “Help Wanted” sign from a flagpole, which functioned both a joke about replacing the dean and a serious cry for administrators to recognize the problems. When the students refused to vacate the office, 11 Wildcats were arrested, according to news reports at the time.
Witnessing the seething anger on campus, Gordon Haaland, then university president, penned an apologetic letter to the student body just before summer break, saying he’d return to campus “ready to examine our moral behavior.” The following fall, administrators presented a plan to address sexual assault, the first steps that would grow into UNH’s current success. Haaland, administered a campus climate survey, which found that within the first six months of the 1987-88 school year, 37 percent of UNH’s women experienced unwanted sexual contact and 10 percent were raped, and males reported 11 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
Haaland also hired a full-time rape services coordinator, who beefed up the immediate services available to survivors, supplementing an underground, grassroots effort started by UNH faculty and staff a decade prior in 1978, according to current staff. That program would grow into SHARPP (Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program), one of the only rape crisis centers located on a college campus that receives independent funding. It also has the distinction of being among the earliest, says Amy Culp, its current director. In the mid-1970s, “there was a big movement [against] domestic violence. Sexual assault didn’t come into the scene really until the early 90s,” she notes, meaning that SHARPP had a two-decade head start, allowing it to mature into the seven full-time staff (including one coordinator for male victims) and 90 volunteers it has today.
For five years, Stapleton provided direct services for rape survivors at SHARPP, including a yearlong stint as its director, before transitioning into research, where she collaborated with three colleagues (Victoria Banyard, Mary Moynihan and Elizabeth Plante, another former SHARPP director), who were using a 2002 National Institute of Justice grant to independently test a new prevention program, Bringing in the Bystander, on UNH’s student body.
The model’s experimental trial at UNH found that students who received three 90-minute training sessions showed significant increases in their willingness to intervene. “Perceived confidence goes up. We do see shifts in their attitudes in terms of, ‘I have a responsibility. I feel like I have a role to play in addressing these issues on my campus,’” says Banyard, a researcher at PIRC. After a two-month check-in, students had also reported more instances where they intervened, although “what’s trickier is figuring out how to link that to reported rates of assault,” Banyard says. Because only a handful of survivors bring their case to university administrators or police, sexual assault is “a hidden crime,” making it tough to measure changes without an established baseline, she adds.
Bringing in the Bystander would be the first rigorously evaluated prevention program on campus — eventually informing today’s “You Can Help” campaign, which is run independently by SHARPP. Drawing on its best elements, as well as those from several other renowned prevention programs (including the athlete-centric Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) and the more emotional Green Dot, a program developed at the University of Kentucky), the messaging of “You Can Help,” is simple, presenting options for what students can do, rather than lecturing them on what they can’t. “We go into classrooms and say, ‘You can help by calling the police. You can help by taking your friend home. You can help by not leaving a friend at a party. You can help by being an advocate,’” says Culp. Student advocates spread the message of “You Can Help” by volunteering at SHARPP to help run the campus 24-hour support line.
SHARPP’s staff teaches workshops on these lessons to students. After running through the causes, prevalence and impacts of rape on campus — “the ‘why’ we do this work,” Culp says — the instructor explains how a person can change the statistics as an active bystander. Rather than watching a very drunk girl be carried into a bedroom, for instance, a bystander should check in to see if the woman wants to go back to her own room instead. Instructors tell stories of interventions that range from aggressively pulling a person away, fists up, to more subtle methods, like drawing the person into a circle of friends on the dance floor. (Football player, Daniel Rowe, prefers a bait-and-switch, telling his teammate, “You know she doesn’t want to talk to you, but there’s this other girl downstairs who really likes you,” even though the second girl is nowhere to be found.) At the end of the session, students fill out an evaluation form that asks them to name specific ways to intervene.
Like the One in Four men’s program at the University of Virginia, the ultimate goal of the training program is to create an environment where perpetrating violence against another community member is socially unacceptable. Undergraduate leaders report that students feel fiercely involved in the cause. “Young adults today don’t want their generation keeping quiet about the pain and horror of [sexual violence]…We want to make it more comfortable to speak out,” says Emily Counts, a sophomore who chairs the Student Senate’s Health and Wellness Committee. Stickers created by SHARPP bearing the simple message, “You Can Help,” now adorn refrigerator doors, corkboards, backpacks and laptops. “There’s so many ways of being a bystander,” Ryan Grogan, a senior history major who works with SHARPP, tells students. “If you let it happen, you’re part of the problem.”
The efforts of upperclassmen like Grogan and Cameron Cook, current student body president who ran on a platform of combating rape and a certified peer educator himself, are particularly valuable to incoming freshmen, whose lack of social capital may deter them from intervening as they’re still trying to adjust to college. You’re basically “asking them to act differently from the crowd when they are trying to fit in and make friends,” Banyard says. Still, training new students early is essential, since some research suggests rape is most likely to occur during the first months of school, a period of time known as the “Red Zone,” when drinking is especially heavy on campuses. During the first two weeks of school, there’s a lot of girls who are “very vulnerable and make very poor decisions,” says Counts. With UNH’s “You Can Help” program, workshops during orientation and consistent messaging give clear actions to new students.
That messaging, however, hasn’t been rigorously tested in the same way Bringing in the Bystander has, but its broader meaning clearly resonates, says Cook. “I think the message is simply to teach everybody in the community to stand up for each other in whatever way possible. Not just with sexual assault, but with other violations as well,” he explains. But while it reinforces the idea that students have the power to help each other, SHARPP’s “You Can Help” doesn’t require students to practice specific techniques to prevent a sexual assault, nor does it experimentally test its effectiveness. The lack of evidence-based training might seem okay for a campus that’s already a White House-recognized model for the rest of the country: one might think, there’s no need to educate students on establishing a safer environment when those norms already exist. But harping on sexual assault without those tangible results that Bringing in the Bystander emphasizes risks making consent workshops seem like a lecture or a joke.
The campus leaders that NationSwell interviewed didn’t treat the subject of sexual assault lightly, but only one student could actually point to a time when he and a few friends had personally intervened by separating a “definitely intoxicated” girl from a group of guys and walking her home. “What happened was the best-case scenario: the young lady was walked home, and that was the end of her night,” explains Justin Poisson, a sophomore fraternity member who staffs SHARPP’s hotline. Others share secondhand stories, like inviting someone in trouble to get pizza or a male friend saying, “Babe, let’s go,” to imply they’re dating. Still, even if those students haven’t personally stood up to anyone, they say there’s a stronger sense of community on campus when it feels like someone has your back. Campus climate surveys, following up on the original 1988 questionnaire, appear to demonstrate progress too: by 2012, self-reported victimization rates had been halved in every category, for both men and women.
Nationwide, focusing on prevention has made a recent resurgence in college dorms. (It briefly fell out of fashion as a solution to campus rape, partially because so much attention from the media and policymakers focused on victims’ horrific stories of rape and accused perpetrators’ demands for a fair hearing, Stapleton says.) And soon, to stay in compliance with Title IX and the Campus SaVE Act, all universities will need to formulate broader responses that include prevention to the rapes occurring on their campus. It’s up to them. Will they do enough to barely stay in compliance? Or will they implement a more robust bystander intervention program (like the one at UNH) that changes how students interact with each other?
By giving sexual assault the attention it deserved, the University of New Hampshire became an undisputed leader. Everyone else has a lot of catching up to do. MORE:Can a College That’s Notorious for Sexual Assault Reform Itself?
The night after Rolling Stone magazine’s since-retracted story “A Rape on Campus,” hit the web, bottles and cinder blocks were hurled through windows at the University of Virginia’s Phi Psi house around 2:45 a.m., and its walls were tagged “UVA Center for Rape Studies.” The following day, in a Slut Walk, angry students marched past the frats on Rugby Road to the dean’s offices in Peabody Hall, chanting, “You can’t get away with this,” and, “One in four, let’s change the score,” a reference to a survey by the Association of American Universities which found that 23.1 percent of female college students experience sexual assault or misconduct while enrolled. Even faculty members held their own Take Back the Party march, tracing a similar route. “It’s shocking that it took an article by Rolling Stone in order to get this started,” Rita Dove, an English professor and former U.S. poet laureate, said in front of the Phi Psi house.
Dove’s comment spoke to the long-simmering outrage on campus, and the fact that almost a quarter of female UVA students experience sexual assault (a self-reported 2015 survey put the university’s exact number at 23.8 percent) marked an opening for an overdue conversation about what enabled rape to occur on school grounds, what could be done to limit further victimization and the role that men should play in the discussion.
Hoos (a nickname for UVA community members) put forward new ideas for policies and programs to prevent future rapes and to shift the conversation from scandal to solutions. Several students called for a thorough review of Greek life, a more robust bystander intervention program and stricter punishments when assailants are found responsible for sexual misconduct. Inter-Fraternity Council members offered to ban hard liquor, place sober brothers as monitors and lock all downstairs bedrooms during social events. On December 1, 2014 in a university address, President Teresa Sullivan applauded the recommendations and announced that many would be implemented. The move likely was also prompted by an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education Office Rights that UVA had been under investigation since 2011 for violating federal law in its handling of gender-based violence — putting the school under legal pressure to ensure it remained compliant with Title IX.
One year later, has the school make progress in improving its campus climate and reducing incidents of sexual assault? During four days in February, NationSwell visited the university, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and is known as Grounds to its 15,700 undergrads, to investigate if there’s been a shift in student behavior that’s resulted in safer sexual interactions.
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In interviews with 16 students (NationSwell reached out to several members of the UVA administration, but were denied requests for comment), a complicated portrait of the aftermath emerged. Most agree that awareness and candid discussion about sexual assault increased and unified the campus. On the whole, Grounds now feels like a safer place. That’s not to say the problem’s solved: In 2014, according to federal data, Hoos reported 44 rapes to the university administration, a significant increase from 2012 (when 16 forcible sexual offenses were reported). That spike could be considered a good sign — more survivors trust the university to handle the misconduct — but it is also hard proof that rape still occurs on campus. As school policies and initiatives aim to foster a safe environment, organizations like the all-male One in Four (its name a nod to the aforementioned sexual assault statistic) educate men and empower them to establish new norms about sexual violence against women, bringing welcome change to a community in need of it.
Before Hoos even start their freshman year, they receive education about nonconsensual sex through two mandatory online modules. But as soon as this official messaging ends and students arrive at their dorms, a different sense of accepted standards on drinking and hooking up can emerge. Those who are the most vocal about their weekend exploits can dominate the conversation, even if the majority is disgusted by the behavior — allowing a sexist norm to persist, says Alan Berkowitz, an independent consultant who advises colleges, the military and public health departments on preventing substance abuse and sexual assault. “My research, which is called the social norms approach, shows that most men don’t think it’s okay, but most men don’t know that most [other] men [also] don’t think it’s okay.”
For more than a decade, One in Four has elevated the discussion about what men can do, either as bystanders who can prevent dangerous situations or as friends who can direct rape survivors to the appropriate professional support. UVA’s chapter was founded by John Foubert, then a dean at the school and now an Oklahoma State University professor and president of the national One in Four network. In his opinion, there were few legal consequences for rapists and only by introducing social pressures — creating a new campus ethic that rejected the objectification of women’s bodies — could UVA’s culture begin to shift. (The university came under fire from student activists for not expelling a single student found responsible for an alleged rape between 2004 and 2014; UVA has reversed course and “recently expelled students responsible for sexual misconduct,” a university spokesperson writes in an email to NationSwell.)
The core component of One in Four’s work is a 45-minute presentation clarifying expectations for how women should be treated and addressing the role of masculinity in stopping campus rape. The class is delivered more than 100 times a year to male groups, including freshman dorms, new classes of fraternity pledges and sports teams. Deviating from Foubert’s original methods, today’s group of 50 members places emphasis on dispelling the notion that false reporting of rape is a common occurrence. One in Four is sticking with the message, “which is to trust survivors,” Yash Shevde, the group’s incoming president, says. “Our job is not to be an investigator.”
One in Four stresses that empathy is the crucial emotion necessary in preventing violence against classmates. At UVA, the presentation’s first exercise generally begins with asking the men in the room to close their eyes. The speaker presents a hypothetical scenario in which a close female relation — sister, girlfriend, best friend — tells the man she has been sexually violated. When the men open their eyes, the speaker briefly refers back to the statistic in the group’s name: chances are that a young woman close to them will experience some form of sexual violence, whether she tells them or not. “But the group doesn’t dwell on the exact numbers, which vary from one survey to the next. “The debate about the statistic is useless,” Shevde says, “because it is still one too many.”
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Grounded in that imagery — thinking about how actions affect a specific woman the man knows rather than someone abstract — the conversation touches on definitions of consent and checks in on the group’s norms, which have often never been discussed explicitly. So, rather than delivering a preachy set of rules, One in Four uses indirect methods to get men talking about what is acceptable behavior. At fraternities, for example, they asked an incoming pledge class to rank actions on a continuum of acceptability, from flirting with someone you’ve just met to touching someone’s genitals without verbal consent, all the way to engaging in sex despite use of the word “no.” Next, pledges are asked to delineate which behaviors are unacceptable and which count as sexual assault. While the exercise seems simple, it gets the young men debating about their viewpoints in a new way. (“When the majority of men know that most other men share their discomfort, they are more likely to intervene,” explains Berkowitz.) From there, One in Four’s presenters give a clear explanation of affirmative consent, stressing that students should strive to hear “yes,” Shevde says, rather than “no” since social pressures, physical intimidation or intoxication can prevent someone from verbalizing an objection, while still not giving consent.
On the surface, it appears that One in Four’s ultimate goal is to make it explicitly clear to rapists that they are alone in their behavior, that the man who treats women as objects for his sexual pleasure isn’t respected by his peers. But that’s not exactly what the group is after. Knowing that only a very small number of men will commit sexual misconduct (6.4 percent are perpetrators), the organization doesn’t waste much time trying to ferret out the one potential rapist in the room with scare tactics, Shevde explains. One in Four doesn’t preach down to the audience or explicitly say, Don’t sexually assault people! “We’re definitely looking at our male audiences as allies, not someone who has to be taught anything,” says Shevde. Instead, the group trains men to be more thoughtful in all their actions, says Kevin Hare, the group’s vice president, as well as empowered to intervene when they see improper sexual advances, Shevde adds.
Shevde worries about men not engaging with the subject because they’ve heard it so many times. No matter how informative One in Four’s lessons might be, it doesn’t matter if the guy in the back of the room tunes them out, tired of hearing about sexual assault after taking the online module before getting to campus, listening to administrators’ speeches or watching his R.A. flyer the dorms with green stickers that mark those trained in bystander intervention.
It’s difficult to measure One in Four’s success. Men may offer respectful discussion while Shevde is in the room, but how do they act that night? Looking for a correlation with reducing violence is even more difficult. Rape, as a crime, is severely underreported: nearly two out of every three sexual assaults — 65 percent — went unreported, according to 2012 findings by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So a decline in the number of cases doesn’t necessarily mean fewer women are being assaulted on campus.
Anecdotally, several female first-years told NationSwell that campus generally feels safe. “After being put under such a spotlight, I figured [UVA] would be better than other places because [the school was] so heavily scrutinized,” says Elizabeth Fadl. And a fourth-year student, Mark Lundy, said he could think of multiple times when he’s grabbed his buddies to separate a girl from a “sketchy” guy. He described the interventions as “a moral duty.” Maybe the situation just looked bad and nothing would have happened anyway, but at the same time, one wonders if Lundy’s small interaction might have prevented another rape on campus.
The problem with activism at the collegiate level is that students only have four years to make a difference before their work resets with a whole new crop of faces. After such a turbulent year, One in Four learned that one-time responses aren’t effective and that the norms it is helping to establish can quickly be unmade. Which is why an ongoing effort — spearheaded by men themselves — is clearly so essential for UVA to triumph at reforming its campus ethos. Homepage photo by Wenhao Wu/PittNews
As young adults across the country head to college this month, they might be worried about more than just getting to class on time. That’s because the Washington Post analyzed the most recent federal campus crime data available and found over 3,900 reports of sexual assaults on American college campuses in 2012. These statistics, coupled with the probability that such crimes are massively underreported, are disturbing, to say the least.
But four North Carolina State University students are developing an innovative product that might bring some peace of mind: a nail polish that changes color when it detects the presence of the date rape drugs, such as Xanax, Rohypnol or GHB in a drink.
How does it work? If the wearer uses her (or his) finger to stir their drink, the polish will change color if any of these drugs are present.
The team of invetors, which consists of Tyler Confrey-Maloney, Stephen Gray, Ankesh Madan and Tasso Von Windheim, are currently raising funds for research and development of the nail polish. According to Lauren K. Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal, a securities filing indicates that they’ve already raised $100,000 from one investor, with the goal of ultimately collecting $250,000.
Back in April, these students won the Lulu eGames, which is sponsored by NC State’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, with their invention. Next they applied to present their startup idea at this fall’s Kairos Global Summit, and earlier this month, made it to the semi-finals.
The young entrepreneurs are keeping mum about when their product will be available, but the idea has already generated widespread interest.
Other products already exist for detecting date rape drugs, including Drink Safe’s testing coasters, and the pd.id, a battery-powered gadget that indicates the presence of drugs when immersed in a beverage, but none of them have the ease of use as nail polish. After all, if it works, Undercover Colors has the advantage of offering users one less thing to carry. Plus, since the polish is invisible, it will likely deter would-be attackers from even trying to spike someone’s drinks since they wouldn’t know who might be wearing it.
As the inventors behind Undercover Colors write on their Facebook page, “In the U.S., 18% of women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. We may not know who they are, but these women are not faceless. They are our daughters, they are our girlfriends, and they are our friends. While date rape drugs are often used to facilitate sexual assault, very little science exists for their detection. Our goal is to invent technologies that empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime.” MORE: The Innovative Blood-Drawing Technique That’s Pain-Free and Saves Money
As of January 3, 2013, there were 20 women in the United States Senate, more than in any other Congress in American history. Last June, that select group convened in the U.S. Capitol’s Appropriations Committee hearing room to privately discuss a direly pressing issue: Military rape. Of the estimated 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in 2012, only 3,000 were reported and 300 prosecuted. It was time for the female senators to agree on a single bill.
Yet they couldn’t do it. Instead, two bills, one from New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and one from Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, moved forward. Gillibrand’s bill, backed by 17 of the female senators, couldn’t overcome a filibuster last week. Only three of the female senators signed onto McCaskill’s bill — yet it’s expected to pass a Monday afternoon Senate vote with flying colors. How did she do it?
For one, McCaskill’s pre-Senate career primed her to address the long-overlooked problem of military rape. McCaskill is one of three former prosecutors now serving as female senators, along with North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp and New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte. TIME notes that McCaskill made her name as an attorney prosecuting rape cases that others wouldn’t touch. “I have more experience prosecuting sexual assault cases than anyone in the Senate. I have spent more time holding the hands of rape victims,” she said when she presented her bill that June day. “This bill does not let anyone off easy.”
That’s no exaggeration. Her bill expands the rights and options for victims, while holding everyone accountable for their actions. For instance, the “good soldier” defense currently invokes factors such as the service record of the accused. McCaskill’s bill would kill that defense. Under her bill, the victim receives a say in whether the case will be handled in a civilian or military court if the crime occurred off of a military base. Meanwhile, a commander’s record on handling of sexual-assault cases would be taken into account with every promotion. As TIME points out, the measure also extends important protections to students in service academies like the Air Force and Naval Academies, where numbers of rapes are increasing.
Opponents exist both inside and outside politics. Some Senators think that McCaskill’s bill is easy on rapists. “The most frustrating thing about this,’’ she told the Washington Post, “is the narrative that, ‘Whose side are you on, the victim’s or the commander’s?’ That’s offensive.” Victims’ groups fear another round broken promises, as politicians such as California’s Barbara Boxer and Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski, have pushed for reforms for decades with no progress.
In the face of scrutiny and competition, all female senators have taken pains to maintain their supportive sorority. Nearly all of the women are now expected to back McCaskill’s bill. “We’re now 20 women total in the Senate,” Mikulski told TIME. “We disagree on some issues, even the bills before us. But we agree on the goal of providing more prosecutorial tools to punish criminals, ensuring fairness in the process and getting help to victims.”
Alaska is America’s “Last Frontier,” one of the most breathtakingly beautiful states. But it also has a dark side: the highest rates of rape and sexual violence in the country. According to 2012 FBI crime data, an estimated 80 rapes are reported in Alaska for every 100,000 people. That’s nearly three times the national average. To determine why these violent acts are occurring so often — and more importantly what can be done to stop them — CNN columnist John D. Sutter spent two weeks in the state for his investigative report, “The Rapist Next Door”, interviewing perpetrators, victims and politicians, as part of the Change the List project. MORE:In Alaska, a Plan to Help Patients Brave the Winter and Get Medical Attention
Sutter tells the story of Sheldon, a man who raped and molested his stepdaughter, Alice, but still lives in a shack directly next door to the family home. (Names have been changed to protect the subjects’ identities.) This may seem counterintuitive, but the proximity is part of a new treatment program centered on offenders. In this program, Sheldon has a “safety net” of five community members, including his wife, Ruth, who make sure that he cannot hide from what he did, but more importantly, won’t be able to harm someone again. According to the program’s director, of 90 sex offenders who have entered the treatment — to be fair, a small sample — the recidivism rate is about 2 percent. To put that in perspective, 5.3% of 9,691 sex offenders nationwide re-offended within three years. DON’T MISS:Amazing Sculptures Out of Alaska
Ruth thinks that Sheldon can change, and Alaska can, too, with more programs that attempt to rehabilitate and support offenders. But the transformation won’t be easy. Sutter hypothesizes that the rape rate is so high because the crimes are tolerated, especially in some remote areas, where law enforcement is scarce and alcohol abuse is common. So, these are some logical reasons, but how can the culture be changed? Sutter writes: “Policy shifts are important, to be sure. The state should broaden the power of tribal courts; expand law-enforcement in rural Alaska; increase the number of women’s shelters, so fewer victims will have to hop a plane to find safety; and expand sex-offender treatment programs like the one in which Sheldon participates.” MORE:Making “Made in America” Cool Again
But you can help, too. CNN has a comprehensive (and vetted) list of five simple ways to make a difference. To get started, here is the condensed version:
