Rape on Campus : It’s on Rise Across U.S., Report Experts Who Say That Schools Don’t Know How to React

During her freshman year at UC Santa Barbara in 1986, Michele was one of a handful of students who remained in her dormitory over the three-day Presidents’ Day weekend. She awakened in the dark that Sunday night to find a man on top of her. He was a stranger, who said he would kill her. She fought him for what seemed to her like hours, screaming in vain as he beat her, until he knocked her unconscious.

When she came to, music was playing on her tape recorder, and her assailant was binding, gagging and blindfolding her with duct tape. He raped her and poured the remains of a drink on her which she, unable to see, feared was lighter fluid that he would ignite. Instead, he partially loosened her bonds and fled.

A Casual Friend

A month earlier at UCLA, in January, 1986, another young woman, also a freshman, was one of the first six back on her dorm floor during registration week. One night she and a small group played “quarters,” a beer-drinking game, and at about 3:30 a.m. the young woman went back to her room, followed by one of the other players. They were casual friends: Occasionally she would borrow his personal computer, and in return for that favor, type papers for him. They had never dated. He came into her room; she told him she had to get some sleep; he said OK, sat on her bed and scratched her back; she dozed off and when she woke several minutes later he was molesting her. She asked him to stop, “in quite a variety of ways.” He did not. When it was over, she got up to go to the bathroom and told him, “Be gone when I get back.” In the morning, she told a girlfriend what had happened. The friend brought her to the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center.

“I was saying it wasn’t rape, because I knew him. The counselor said, ‘Yes (Holly), this is called rape.”

Those two stories about college life today are all too typical.

Starting in the spring of 1987, Gail Abarbanel and Aileen Adams, director and legal counsel of the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center respectively, said recently, they began noticing a significant increase in the number of cases involving campus rape, many of which were “acquaintance rape” situations where the assailant and victim knew each other. In a six-week period, 16 such victims came in to the center; since then there have been an additional 43. (The center sees about 1,000 victims a year, not all of them new cases, from all segments of society, ranging in age, thus far, from 2 to 94.)

The women were from small colleges and large universities all over the country--Texas, Boston, Chicago, New York and California. Those from out-of-town schools were either home for the summer or had dropped out, often due to their experience. There were instances of fraternity party gang rapes, dormitory rape, date rape, stranger rape.

“The single factor that stood out in all of these cases,” Abarbanel said, “is that universities were totally unprepared to respond to these cases.”

“The cases differed, but universities and colleges consistently did wrong,” Adams said. “None handled the situation well and that is why we wrote this booklet. We wanted to summarize the problems and the solutions.”

The booklet, “Sexual Assault on Campus: What Colleges Can Do,” is being released by the center today and is being sent to the presidents of all 3,200 of the nation’s institutions of higher learning, as well as to editors of campus newspapers and women’s magazines.

Drawing on several recent national surveys, the booklet cites a 1987 survey that found that out of 6,000 students polled from 32 colleges across the country, one out of every six female students reported being a victim of rape or attempted rape during the preceding year. The majority of the cases reported were “acquaintance” rape. In addition, one out of every 15 male students in the survey reported committing rape or attempting to commit rape during that same period. The survey, guaranteeing anonymity, asked the question of the male students in a variety of ways, Adams and Abarbanel said, from calling it rape, to describing the behavior or use of force.

More Than 90% Unreported

Another national survey cited in the booklet found that more than 90% of the rapes among college women went unreported.

Adams and Abarbanel are seeking to change those statistics through preventive education, the establishment of adequate security, adoption of realistic policies and procedures, and what they call “victim assistance” programs.

“Colleges and universities have a very clear duty to warn students of known danger. To the extent they don’t do that, they increase their liability,” Adams said.

They want colleges to warn students of the danger of “acquaintance rape” in orientation programs for incoming classes, to conduct similar sessions in dormitories, fraternities and sororities, and to publicize sexual assaults when they do occur. (They commended UCLA and Wesleyan for sending out bulletins notifying students whenever there is a sexual assault, including a composite drawing of the suspect when possible.)

Many of the victims are freshmen, they said, and pointed to the vulnerability of both men and women in that age group: away from home for the first time, quasi-independent, under tremendous peer pressure, testing the rules, making their own rules. In general, the majority of victims and offenders in rape cases are of college age.

Adopt Policies

Adams and Abarbanel also want the institutions to adopt policies and procedures to follow in the event of rape and sexual assault. For starters, as opposed to current policies, they would like rape to be specifically forbidden on campus as are cheating, forgery, theft and use of alcohol.

When the rape involves two students as victim and perpetrator, they want the victim to have at least as many rights as the accused--again not currently the case. Too often the victim is discouraged from pursuing a hearing, they said, citing one case where the victim was told she could not have someone accompany her to the hearing, whereas the accused, an important athlete on campus, could bring as many people as he wished.

The two young women described here came into the Rape Treatment Center last week to tell their stories separately. (Michele did not want her last name used; “Holly” asked that her real name not be used.) They both told of their very dissimilar assaults in strikingly similar ways. They sounded cool, sardonic, almost flip about the rapes, the official reactions of their respective universities, and the treatment they received by various bureaucratic institutions--hospitals, law enforcement agencies, college administrators.

Michele acknowledges this. “What I just told you--that’s just a story. I remove myself from it. I can talk about it like that. It’s so out of real life. But if I sit and actually think about it,” she said, breaking off and becoming rather disjointed and increasingly agitated as she explained that “people have to treat me differently.” Her friends and family know that she will not see horror movies and that she can not bear descriptions of violence or talk of death. “I came too close. I can’t handle it.”

Far from being cool or flip, she spent the summer last year sleeping on the floor of her parents’ bedroom every night. This summer, she is back in her own room, but was dismayed to find, several weeks ago, that when her father arose before 5 one morning and she awakened to unusual sounds, she ran into her closet shaking and crying before she knew what she was doing.

“Just when I thought I was getting over it.”

The rapist was never caught. She sued the UC Regents for damages, basing much of her case on the security of the building--charging that entrances were regularly left propped open, that there was no round-the-clock guarded entrance where people would be screened, that the corridor near her room had been darkened for months as an “energy-saving” measure, and that contrary to university policy, locks to the rooms were left unchanged even though several master keys were known to have disappeared. Two weeks ago, there was an out-of court settlement of $140,000.

Like Michele, Holly, too, moved into an apartment off campus and now says, “No way. You couldn’t pay me to live in a dorm.”

Sought Criminal Charges

With the encouragement of the Rape Treatment Center, she sought both criminal charges and a disciplinary hearing at the university. Because she had been drinking and she knew the accused, she said, the criminal charges were dropped as unwinnable. Interviews with university officials dragged on until May, she said. No disciplinary hearing was ever held, and, to her dissatisfaction, the university considers the case closed.

However, the security procedures at the dorm have been strengthened, Adams said, “and they have established excellent protocols about what to do” if a rape occurs.

Talking about the future of the booklet and its effect, Abarbanel said, funding permitting, the center would like to follow it up with a video for use in orientation. In the meantime, there is much the colleges can do.

“We’d like to see them set up a task force of students, faculty and other personnel to review the recommendations and act on them,” she said. “If they were to accept some of our recommendations, students would feel freer to come forward. . . . Eventually, this would lead to fewer assaults.”

“We feel they should implement (the recommendations) because it’s the right thing to do,” Adams said, “but it certainly is also in their economic interest to do so. As the ‘duty to warn’ and foreseeability (become established legally), they’re really setting themselves up if they fail to warn.”