Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
It was a rainy afternoon; my friend and I were curled up with cups of cinnamon tea. She looked out the gothic paned windows and whispered, “Dana, I don’t know how people aren’t running around this campus screaming.”
We watched as people holding books over their heads dashed to make the bus. Those with umbrellas lingered longer, chatting with friends until they too sought shelter from the unabated rain.
“I know,” I breathed back.
It’s now almost daily that I find out another person I know has been sexually assaulted. Or committed sexual assault. The stories I’ve heard make my skin crawl. Each story is another dark cloud, another gust of cold wind, adding to the never-ending downpour.
The biggest survey on sexual violence ever conducted was released last week and included responses from more than 150,000 students at 27 research universities. It confirmed that the number of women sexually assaulted on college campuses is nearly 25 percent. Just think about that. One in four. That means college women have a better chance of being sexually assaulted than of getting the flu—and we all remember the petri dish that is a first-year dorm.
Sexual assault is disturbingly common. If a room has more than 4 women in it, chances are there’s a survivor among them. If you have more than 4 female friends, chances are you know a survivor. And yet despite the prevalence of sexual assault, it’s still considered a taboo topic. Revealing oneself as a survivor is often met with shock and awkward silence, or even outright disbelief and disapproval. We clearly need to work on these immediate reactions, because last week’s survey found that 75 percent of survivors will tell a friend what happened. How you react to a person telling you about their assault will largely color their entire healing process.
The survey also revealed disturbing facts about bystander behavior, finding that among those reporting witnessing a drunk person heading to a sexual encounter, a whopping 77 percent did absolutely nothing. This isn’t to say that every drunk person headed to a sexual encounter ended up having sex or that the encounter constituted sexual assault, but it does reflect bystanders’ alarming ambivalence regarding the outcome of the situation. Perhaps even more disturbingly, more than half of people who witnessed “someone acting in a sexually violent or harassing manner” did nothing.
Just because you think you would never be the victim or perpetrator of sexual assault doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. By refusing to act when we see someone in trouble, we are tacitly allowing perpetrators to commit assaults unabated. Bystander intervention in sexual assault is the classic “if you see something, say something.” That doesn’t seem particularly difficult, right?
In practice, bystander intervention is so much harder. What do you do when the aggressor is your best friend? Frat brother? Someone you’ve been romantically involved with before, consensually? What if the victim is wearing a really revealing dress? If they were dancing at Shooters? If both people are intoxicated? If they’ve had sex before? If they’re friends? Dating? If you don’t know the people at all?
These aren’t random hypothetical scenarios; these are the real situations each of us encounter every single day. I’ve heard, seen or experienced every single one of them. It takes a lot of training, practice and self-confidence to know how you would respond to each one of these, and if when reading this you don’t know how you would act, consider signing up for PACT, Duke’s bystander intervention training.
Sexual assault is a horrifying topic, made all the more terrifying by the sheer numbers of survivors and unknowing friendships we have with many perpetrators. In that monsoon of disgust, it can be much more tempting to seek shelter from the downpour and willfully ignore those being soaked outside. It’s a lot easier to carry your own umbrella and, if it’s big enough, convince yourself that it isn’t actually raining.
But it is pouring.
We need to force ourselves to see the real scope of this problem. Sexual assault isn’t something that happens to a small minority of people. For too many, it becomes a defining part of the college experience. For so many survivors, a simple intervention on the part of their peers could have changed the course of that night and the course of their lives. I look back on my own experience and wish someone had been standing there looking out for me.
If we care about our peers and want them to succeed in their pursuits, both at Duke and beyond, we have the moral imperative, the responsibility, to act for our fellow students. Even if acting makes us feel awkward, uncomfortable or obnoxious, those few moments of discomfort are a small price to pay for being the force that changes another person’s story for the better.
Dana Raphael is a Trinity junior. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.
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