“I had to lie there while he abused me, while he took away my dignity, while he took away my feeling of safety and took away part of my happiness.” – Christina*, a student at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa
“He wasn’t the nice guy I knew anymore. He made it clear that we weren’t going back to camp until this happened.” – Rachel*, a senior at Penn State University
Christina and Rachel never thought it would happen to them. They were both around trusted friends in typical college settings. But today, they are both sexual assault victims—and survivors.
What’s more, they’re not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one out of every five women experiences attempted or completed sexual assault in college. As students continue to face and cope with this growing problem, colleges and universities are just beginning to react. Keep reading to find out what they’re saying, what they’re doing and what they’re not doing… yet.
“One Night That Changed My Life”
The night of Christina’s attack started out just like any typical night out in college—but it ended much worse. She went to a party several months ago, enjoyed a couple drinks and ended up a victim of sexual assault. She had known lots of people at the party, but she had just met her attacker that night. As it turns out, he was there because he was a friend of her ex-boyfriend.
“It was the day that turned my world upside down,” she says. “This guy I didn’t even know at all got on me and started kissing me, and I was okay with it. He took a step further, and I again was okay with it, but the moment I said stop and he didn’t, I was not okay with it.”
Ultimately, Christina’s attacker took more than just her physical control away from her. “I was ashamed, and I kept blaming others and myself,” she says.
But the nightmare didn’t end the next morning. In the months following her attack, her grades dropped, she was afraid to go out again and ultimately, she was diagnosed with depression.
“It took me quite some time to come to terms with what I went through,” she says. “I have been blessed with great friends and family who stayed by me and helped me return back to my normal self again. It has been months since the rape, and it’s been months since I have survived and rebuilt my life.”
Today, Christina is well on her way to graduating from St. Ambrose, but with a much different college experience than she had expected.
“I Froze”
Sexual assault in college isn’t confined to the nightlife scene. After transferring to Penn State, Rachel took a mission trip with an on-campus Christian ministry over spring break. One night, she took a walk with her close guy friend, but she never expected what happened next.
“Of course I hadn’t thought twice when he asked me to take a walk with him. We had never hung out outside of the club before, so this was a chance for us to get to know each other one-on-one,” she says. “But when we were alone, he changed. He got really quiet and answered my questions with one word.”
At the time, Rachel had wanted to get to know the guy better. “I thought he was generally interested in dating me, so I did want to kiss him, but that was it. After we kissed, I said I wanted to go back to camp,” she says. “He said, ‘I have a problem … can you help me with my problem?’ When I realized what he was talking about, I was completely shocked.”
That’s when, Rachel says, her friend took it a step too far. “He didn’t use powerful force, and I really could have fought him off, but I didn’t. I froze,” she says. “The way he talked, his tone, his stance—it was all very threatening. He wasn’t the nice guy I knew anymore. He made it clear that we weren’t going back to camp until this happened.”
Because they had walked so far from their campsite, Rachel didn’t know how to get back on her own, and she had no cell service to call for help.
For the rest of the trip and many months down the road, Rachel kept the experience to herself. When she finally did decide to tell someone, she got a surprising response. “Before I went to the police, I actually told the pastor of the organization and his wife about the rape. She encouraged me to report it (out of his earshot), but he made me feel terrible,” she says. “He told me I must have really ‘wanted to have sex.’ He said I probably felt guilty afterwards so I made up this rape story. I felt unexplainably frustrated and powerless.”
Ultimately, Rachel did report her assault to counselors and the police department, but because she had waited, there was no physical evidence; most physical evidence of sexual assault must be collected within 72 hours. Since the assault didn’t happen on campus, but rather in a different state, there was little the police department could do. The local police department couldn’t press charges because the incident didn’t happen in its local jurisdiction.
“Even though nothing came out of reporting it, [telling people] really helped me move on,” Rachel says. “Reporting my rape gave me back what my rapist took: my power.”
While Rachel knows there was little the police could do, she does think there is more the university (including her pastor) can do. “As a representative of the school, he should not have told me that,” she says. “I don’t think school officials are doing enough to handle and prevent cases of sexual assault. At the end of the day, sexual assault cases make a school look bad, and the school is a business, after all. So while school officials might be legally required to encourage victims [to] report rape, you know they want victims to do anything but.”
Nearly three years after her attack, Rachel hopes she can help other victims even if the university can’t. “It was always my hope that I would eventually be able to talk about it openly enough in order to help other women. I’ve tried in the past, but it has never worked out,” she says. “It has been almost three years now, and I think I am finally at that point.”
“Totally Unacceptable”
As emotional as these collegiettes’ stories sound, their experiences are nothing out of the ordinary on modern college campuses. In February, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara reported being gang-raped by a group of three men—the second such complaint at UCSB in just two months. In late March, The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, published an anonymous open letter from a sexual assault victim to the university. The victim criticized Harvard’s 20-year-old policy as outdated and claimed that university representatives believed she was “fussing over nothing.”
While nearly 20 percent of women experience some form of sexual assault in college, almost 100 percent of their attackers will never bear the consequences. Of all rape encounters, though, 60 percent go unreported, and just three percent of attackers will ever serve a single day in prison for their crime, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).
HC conducted its own survey of more than 30 collegiettes across the country, finding that a majority of women have felt unsafe on their college campuses. What’s more, an overwhelming majority of collegiettes (83 percent) is not confident that they could protect themselves from an attempted sexual assault. Even if they are not victims themselves, most collegiettes (nearly 65 percent) know at least one person who has been sexually assaulted in college.
Like Rachel, many victims feel that colleges and universities are not doing enough to protect them from and support them through such violence. In February, 31 current and former students at the University of California, Berkeley filed federal complaints against the university, claiming that officials mishandled the students’ sexual assault cases.
It’s because of instances and statistics like these that President Obama has called the current environment of sexual assault in college “totally unacceptable.” In January, Obama created the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to offer official recommendations to colleges and universities about the ways in which they should handle such cases.
It’s also because of instances and statistics like these that colleges and universities have started to address the problem themselves.
“We’re Getting There”
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is no stranger to the public eye. After the university made headlines in 2013 for its questionable handling of a sexual assault case, administrators realized that something needed to change—but has it?
In a 2013 case, UNC student Landen Gambill faced possible expulsion after accusing an unidentified ex-boyfriend and fellow UNC student of raping her. Gambill decided to come forward with details about her assault (without identifying the attacker by name), and in return, she was charged with violating the portion of the UNC Honor Code that prohibits “intimidating behavior that willfully abuses, disparages or otherwise interferes” with another student’s academic career. The case was eventually dropped, but the discussion of sexual assault was not.
In May 2013, UNC created its own task force to revise and implement sexual assault policies on campus. The Title IX Task Force meets regularly and updates the community via blog posts, but policy changes have not yet been made or implemented almost a year later. Even without the formal changes, though, the university prides itself on the conversation it has started.
“There’s not a week that goes by that the student newspaper doesn’t talk about it,” says Ew Quimbaya-Winship, UNC’s deputy Title IX and student complaint coordinator. “We’re in the national news at least monthly, and that should make some uncomfortable, but it’s not.”
Although there are significant challenges to dealing with this issue, Quimbaya-Winship sees the value in starting the process off with a conversation. “I think there’s a lot of energy and interest, and I think all of this is encouraging more reporting because it’s just part of the conversation,” he says.
Some of the changes that UNC plans to make include taking students out of the hearing process that decides sexual assault cases on campus and streamlining the reporting and investigating processes. Students will still have a role in the oversight of sexual assault policy, Quimbaya-Winship says, but students and faculty seem to agree that there is no appropriate place for students in the decision-making process of individual cases.
This new conversation and talk of change is affecting student behavior, in Quimbaya-Winship’s opinion. “We are going through [the reporting process] more now than we were when I first got here—and that’s the way it should be,” he says. “We don’t yet know how to stop violence, but to the degree that we live in a world where violence happens, I like that students are finding safety in our reporting structure.”
When asked what more colleges and universities can do, Quimbaya-Winship admits that there is a long road ahead. “We need to be challenging those cultural expectations that allow violence in the first place, but it’s an evolution, and we’re getting there,” he says.
Part of what’s missing is a focus on prevention. “There’s been a lot of attention paid to the response, and rightfully so, but I think we need to reenergize the prevention stuff,” he says. “It’s about social norms, it’s about bystander intervention, it’s about redefining masculinity and helping women and men be more confident in relationships and understand what healthy relationships are.”
Another part of the problem is student awareness. Rachel says she didn’t report her assault to university administrators because she didn’t realize that the school could levy consequences. “I was not aware that any academic consequences could come from a crime like this,” she says. “I wish I had known because I would have reported it to administrators then.” She now knows that sexual assaults could result in expulsion, according to Penn State’s policy.
HC’s survey results suggested that like Rachel, most collegiettes aren’t sure what their universities can do for them after they experience sexual assault. More than 60 percent of respondents reported having either no knowledge or limited knowledge of their university’s sexual assault resources.
It’s a big problem to solve, and so far, no clear solutions have been identified. But thanks to brave collegiettes like Christina and Rachel who are willing to share their stories with the public, a conversation has begun amongst university administrators across the country. While it’s far from a solution, this conversation is an important first step. We hope it’s just a matter of time until those solutions follow suit.
If you or someone you know is a victim of sexual assault, seek help immediately from law enforcement or call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE.
*Names have been changed.