“Approximately 1 in 5 women will be a victim of sexual assault while attending college.” I’ve seen this statistic publicized and used all around UCSB. I don’t know if I’ve become jaded in recent years due to the increase in assault awareness through news and social media but if you take a second to think about it, that is an incredibly high number. It seems almost unfathomable to conceptualize, but everyday experiences around campus serve as a stark reminder that these types of crimes do occur, and on a pretty frequent basis.
At the beginning of fall quarter, UCPD sent out two separate alerts within a few days of each other both pertaining sexual assault. Incidents like these raise the important question: How can we prevent assault crimes from happening in our community?
Image via UCSB Police Department
We- as a community- should be actively working to reexamine our perspective towards campus sexual assault. But before you start typing your hashtags and making signs to protest in front of the arbor (no hate, ya’ll make my walk to class much more interesting), we should first look to revising UCPD’s timely warnings. Hear me out. While raising awareness by posting online and protesting are both noble acts, shifting the narrative through which sexual assault is discussed on campus requires more than identifying assault as a pertinent problem. To reshape our attitudes on assault, we must debunk certain stigmas and myths associated with this topic. A good place to start is changing the misleading information placed in these warnings.
Under the Clery Act, UCPD issues out warnings pertaining to certain crimes committed on or around the campus community. Information is provided about the nature of the crime, the suspect, and safety tips to “aid in crime prevention”. The first two components of the warning are necessary in informing students about an ongoing threat to campus, my problem lies with the supposedly helpful “safety tips” provided at the bottom of the emails.
For too long women have been solely responsible for defending and protecting themselves against scary predators, placing the burden of assault on them. If the perpetrator succeeds in their attempts, the victim is led to believe if only they had been more careful or done something differently, the assault would have never occurred. This narrative is heard all the time in some form or the other, it’s the classic “Her skirt was too short” or “She was out too late at night.”
When UCPD warns of a criminal who attempted to assault a victim, it is disheartening to see that “safety tips” they feel will stop a potential crime from occurring all refer to ways in which a potential victim can stop an assault from transpiring. This includes advice such as “When drinking, consider your surroundings, be aware of personal limits, and look after friends who appear to be intoxicated” and “If you start to feel concerns about a person or a situation, trust your instincts and try to remove yourself as quickly as possible from the potential threat”. Sure, one could attempt to abide by these tips, constantly acting in a defensive manner and avoiding all social situations for fear of a potential attack. But the truth is, not only are these safety tips completely unrealistic to follow; they systematically hold women to an entirely different (and much higher) standard.
Including information that solely targets one group leads the other to believe it is not their problem or place to prevent incidents of assault. Rather than instilling fear and alienating possible allies, timely warnings can work to facilitate attitude change by providing more inclusive tips for safety. Timely alerts are a platform for reaching the student population. Additionally, through Clery Act guidelines, they effectively demonstrate a problem exists with assault on campus. It seems like a trivial aspect in the continuous fight against the stigmatization of assault, but people severely underestimate the various levels of attitude change required for a transformation of social standards. The reason why the “1 in 5” statistic still exists is because of the antipathetic attitude towards actively preventing assault. UCPD can be a key ally in shifting this attitude for the betterment of our campus community.