Last spring I attended the annual Take Back the Night speak-out on the Chapel Quadrangle. The last stop on the Night's march between East and West Campuses, and the capstone for Sexual Assault Prevention Week, the speak-out is a remarkable event: Participants step up to a microphone and share their personal experiences with rape and sexual assault, one after another, for hours.
Some stories are decades old, others are incredibly fresh, many are being revealed for the first time ever on that night. It's harrowing, raw and exhausting, but for many of its participants and those in the audience, speaking out seems to be genuinely healing.
Over the course of the evening, several men came forward to air tales of friends or family that had been sexually assaulted, or to pledge their support for efforts to end sexual assault. Although I was impressed by their show of solidarity, I wound up feeling that something was lacking, that the male contribution to the speak-out was more notable for what had not been said than what had.
The majority of rapes and assaults brought up in the speak-out were never reported to the police, but none of the men who spoke expressed a desire to find those responsible and hurt them severely. None of the men displayed the kind of blind rage at the perpetrators that I was feeling at the time. None of them spoke of a willingness to defend his female friends and family with more than his words.
This is no slight on the men who participated in that speak-out; not at all. To be honest, that evening was probably neither the time nor the place for such sentiments.
But in talking about sexual assault on Duke's campus, it's a conversation we never seem to have. As a man, what I am supposed to do about sexual assault? Why do all the solutions offered to me-signing vows never to harm women, protesting the use of sexist language-seem so impotent and lacking?
And most of all, is there a place for my desire for physical confrontation with the perpetrators of these crimes? Is there a case to be made for violent physical retaliation in dealing with sexual assault at Duke?
Go back a few decades, and it seems like my reaction was well within the norm. Men were expected to channel their violent impulses to the defense of the women in their lives. In our grandparents' generation and up until the 1960s, raping or assaulting a woman meant facing the very real threat of being hunted down and beaten or killed by her male relatives. Although I can't and won't advocate this kind of response, I also imagine it would be an enormous disincentive for a would-be rapist.
I don't want to idealize this period of American history any more than it already has been; I know it had its own massive problems, and I'm certainly not arguing for a return to a pre-Sexual Revolution set of cultural mores.
For better or worse, we no longer raise American men to defend women, and we no longer expect them to integrate violence into their lives constructively. We're way past the days when fathers taught their sons the proper way to throw a punch, and in most ways, that's a huge improvement.
But it still leaves me, and, I suspect, much of Duke's male population feeling pretty useless in the face of a tremendous and persistent problem.
In 2004, there were 94,635 incidents of rape in the country as a whole, and although the numbers have consistently fallen since peaking in the 1980s, the Department of Justice still estimates that 61 percent of rapes go completely unreported. It only gets worse on college campuses, with surveys indicating that one in five college-aged women will be raped or sexually assaulted.
I know women who were assaulted here at Duke. You probably do as well. None of them reported it to the police. Their attackers suffered no, or very little, punishment.
Call me bloodthirsty, but I can't help believing that if there were implicit, socially recognized consequences for sexual assault and harassment of women on this campus, beyond chastisement, beyond verbal disapproval, assault and rape would be far less common.
When so many rapists are never brought to trial, there needs to be another mechanism for keeping their behavior in check. To me, one answer may be violent retaliation on the part of the men of this University.
I know that right now many of you are cringing in horror at these proposals, and to be honest I'm not in love with them myself. But at the very least, these ideas-the role of men as the defenders of women, extra-legal consequences for those that commit rape, the use of physical violence against perpetrators of sexual assault-need to enter our ongoing dialogue about rape and sexual assault on this campus.
We need to do a better job of constructing a meaningful male response to sexual assault at Duke if we ever plan on ending it. Until then, I'll be left with two clenched fists and no one to use them on.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Tuesday.
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