If someone steals our laptop, makes a ridiculous comment in class or spills our coffee on the C-1, we generally tell everyone about it. Countless Facebook statuses and “likes!” later, we’ve successfully let the world know about our experience, and we’ve received outside validation that the situation we just encountered was “so awful!”
Nevertheless, unlike someone knocking your tray over in the Great Hall, there are some experiences that are so personal and so intimate, that when violated, their discussion can stay silenced for years. Instead of telling our hundreds of Facebook friends within seconds of its occurrence, it can take years to tell even one safe person about an experience of actual or attempted sexual assault.
Chances are however, that with 20 percent of college women and 6 percent of college men being victims of actual or attempted sexual assault, sometime in your life if someone trusts you enough, they will approach you and tell you about an experience of gender violence they have experienced. With one in five women, and one in 10 men being victims of sexual assault in their lifetime, it is an unavoidable consequence of gender violence that the experience of sexual assault will someday relate directly to you.
Yet even with these staggering numbers, it is recorded that 42 percent of the rape victims told no one about the assault, and only 5 percent reported it to the police. This means that there must be some barrier that stops a large majority of victims from ever telling anyone.
Was there ever an event in your life that you never told anyone about? What might have stopped you?
“I didn’t think it was serious enough.... It happened with someone I was close to.... I was blacking out and I couldn’t say no.... I was worried what might happen if someone found out.”
As student members of Duke’s Gender Violence Prevention and Intervention Task Force, we were told at the start of our 2011-2012 term that in the past academic school year, 45 individuals went to the Duke Women’s Center to confidentially discuss their experience with sexual assault with an advocate in the Gender Violence office. Two of these individuals decided to make a formal report to the Undergraduate Conduct Board to ask that the perpetrator be held accountable for his or her actions, thereby making him or her eligible to receive academic sanctions, such as the removal of a perpetrator from classes shared with the victim.
Hearing these numbers, as students, it is nothing other than disturbing; the fact that the number is even one means that someone has had a violating, heartbreaking, life changing trauma during their Duke career. Yet the fact that only 45 individuals came forward, when even the most basic underreporting statistics tell us that the number is probably much closer to being at least 26 percent of our student body, that means that experiences of sexual assault at Duke aren’t coming forward.
The Women’s Center can provide a confidential, safe and professional resource for a devastating incident that many victims report as impacting the rest of their lives. As students on Duke’s GVPI Task Force, we used this last semester to craft a survey that we hoped students would feel comfortable filling out to describe why they perceive that students may or may not come forward to report an incident of sexual assault to the Women’s Center, UCB or DUPD.
Were you ever the victim of sexual assault at Duke? Did you tell anyone about it? If you have not been a victim of sexual assault, but now know that it goes largely underreported, what do you thinks stops students from telling reporting centers on campus? Our 10-minute survey is confidential, and can be found here: https://duke.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1XfP0oNFRy0AzVG. It is our hope that students complete the survey and describe what they perceive to be the causes of the silence surrounding reporting of sexual assault on Duke’s campus. Your response will helps us move one step closer to improving prevention and response for victims and their supporters.
Megan Weinand, Trinity ’12
Jaimie Woo, Trinity ’13
Stephen Iya, Trinity ’12
Nathan Nye, Trinity ’13
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