The other night I came home to my apartment on Central and my roommate, Jeanne, told me that a DUPD officer had been by Colleen's and that Colleen said that the officer said that Sunday night a girl had been full-out raped two buildings down; had she heard anything? Apparently the girl had come home to her apartment in the early evening, had left the apartment unlocked, and the guy was waiting....
But then another officer had been by Laura's, and Jeanne said that Laura said that the officer said that the girl said she had been sleeping, and the guy had come into her apartment, which was unlocked, in the early morning and raped her....
But then Tuesday's Chronicle said that the girl hadn't been raped but assaulted, and it was only being called an assault because "'she'd been touched'." And I began to wonder if there was just a ton of misinformation, or if these were all separate events....
Then I looked at my Monday Chronicle and it said a girl had been raped in the forest on Friday, which made me think Duke Forest, off Old Erwin and by Fuqua, and I wasn't sure why anyone would be there at night in the first place, especially by themselves on a Friday (not that it should matter, but it does), but then it turns out it was between Edens and the bus stop, or the WEL and the Women's Center, or "that path everyone's been saying is sketchy since forever" (whatever you want to call it), but then I look at the crime briefs on the DUPD site that I got from an e-mail from a DSG guy which he'd forwarded from another DSG guy and that says something else....
Are you still with me? Because I'm not.
Trying to figure out the weekend's unpleasantness actually gave me a headache, and I still don't know what to believe. Despite my frustration, the search for details--not big ones, like names of survivors, but important ones, like the new Scary Place on Campus I Should Avoid After 6 p.m.--has been a convenient distraction from actually considering and thinking about the assaults, and their implications for me and my community.
Sexual assault traditionally invites ambivalent reactions, waving from open doubt to saccharine pity, from the usual ways in which people react to trauma. Often, trauma brings out the best in people dealing taking the responsibility of co-survivorship. Death--neighbors make meals and old friends send cards. Broken leg? Flowers and offers to chauffeur. Terminal illness: a donations to the charity of your choice. You'd rather have neither, but people do what they can. It has always angered me that sexual assault victims often don't get these gestures and that negative judgment is so rampant.
I noticed something different this time around. I would watch guys open their papers, widen their eyes at the news and nudge their friends.
The general refrain: "That's not cool. This is messed up." Talking to female friends about it. Putting notices about a screaming protest in their away message.
Nothing earth-shattering, but several worlds better than "she was just asking for it, walking alone/forgetting to lock up." Though I don't know if, as a sign, it's better or worse--with stranger rapes happening every year (in addition to all the party rapes, which we don't hear about, which merit an entirely different column), perhaps the Duke community's grown inured. Or maybe it's because the assaults over the weekend were so clearly attacks: intrusions of property, creepy-sneakiness, committed by strangers.
Whatever happened and however difficult it's been to find any consistent information, these cases have "victim" spelled out in nice clear letters. There's an innocent girl and a bad guy: we know how to react.
I wrote that trauma brings out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst. In this case, it's ignorance, for instance guys (and some girls) who don't understand that knowing about a nearby assault promptly is a big deal to a lot of women. That I didn't know about an assault that happened on my block for almost two days is inexcusable. E-mails have been flying about the assault, teeming with rage that has no target. I like to think that this is all because as a community, we feel violated, and will do everything we can to prevent it from happening again.
I realize that I make some generalizations and presume some truths. While they're educated conjectures, I can't know the real situations, and cannot presume to know the survivors and their network of friends and family, who have all (and again I assume) been rocked by the weekend far more than I have. But I still feel the effects, and I resent them. I resent that when I walk from rehearsal in the BC to my car in Physics I have to hold my keys out, and that the cold metal makes my hand freeze. I resent that when I enter my apartment I have to check all the rooms to make sure they're empty before putting anything down. I resent that as I write this in my apartment, I half-believe that somebody will creep up behind me and put a hand over my mouth. And most of all, I resent that even as I have this opportunity to make my voice heard, and use it to cry that this is an unacceptable thing to happen on our campus, nothing that I, as a girl, student and citizen, do or say can stop it from happening--in the past, the present or the future.
Meghan Valerio is a Trinity senior. Her column appears every third Thursday.
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