Harassed, or just bummed?
THE AMERICAN ASSN. of University Women released a study Tuesday titled “Drawing the Line,” which showed that nearly two-thirds of college students had experienced sexual harassment. More interestingly, the study, which involved an online poll of 2,036 undergraduate students, indicated that 51% of males and 31% of females admitted to being harassers themselves.
Call me naive, contrarian or, more likely, a product of a hyper-feminist college environment, where any man who wore a skimpy bathing suit in the pool was regarded as a potential rapist (if not Eurotrash, which was almost worse), but those numbers seem really high.
What about all the work my generation did with our “take back the night” vigils and mandatory protect-yourself-from-harassment role-playing exercises for incoming freshmen? How is it that I managed to get though college with nary (that I noticed) a threatening gaze -- and we had coed bathrooms! -- and the majority of students in 2006 can’t make it to graduation without being violated in some form?
According to Elena Silva, director of research for the AAUW Educational Foundation, who presented the findings at a news conference Tuesday (the transcript is available on the AAUW website), the study revealed that “sexual harassment is common among today’s undergraduate students -- ‘so common that [as one student put it] it seems normal.’ ” Silva went on to explain that “most college students are experiencing non-contact forms of harassment -- jokes, gestures, remarks -- but nearly one-third are experiencing some type of physical contact sexual harassment (this ranges from being touched or grabbed to being forced to do something sexual).”
Silva also explained that it was rare that the perpetrator acted out of romantic interest or because he or she thought such behavior was part of college life. Instead, most harassers tended to rationalize their behavior by saying they were just trying to be funny.
Oh, and before I forget, here’s the definition of “sexual harassment” that students were given when taking the survey: “unwanted or unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes with your life.”
I take it back. The numbers seem low.
I don’t want to make light of sexual harassment, but apparently the AAUW does. Though there’s nothing unusual about broadening legal definitions to make press releases (and student questionnaires) easier to understand, “interfering with your life” seems like the kind of blanket term under which a person (or a women’s advocacy group whose mission is slightly less urgent now that the majority of college students are female) could hide indefinitely.
All of us encounter life interferences on a daily basis, some of them sexual in nature. And if I recall correctly from my own experience, college students tend to wear their stress like a badge of honor. The more angst-ridden you are, be it from exams, relationships or, apparently these days, being shown sexual pictures, the more faithfully you’re following the rules of the “Bell Jar”-inspired college handbook.
Under federal law, sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that involves either coercion, such as a boss’ demand for sex in exchange for continued employment, or that interferes with an employee’s work performance by creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment. And while I’m not suggesting that “pulling off or down your clothing” or “touching, grabbing, or pinching in a sexual way” (two of the categories on the questionnaire) constitute mere dormitory high jinks to which only a self-styled Sylvia Plath would take offense, there does seem to be a wide gulf between these sorts of acts (which are physical and potentially violent) and being subjected to a tasteless joke, which, while annoying, is arguably the kind of thing that a liberal arts student should be able to contextualize and handle accordingly (either by devising an independent-study course about the sociology of sexual objectification in humor or by giving the joke teller the finger and calling it a day).
The problem with the AAUW study as it has been presented is not that it asked about these issues, but that it failed to ask whether they were affecting students’ abilities to perform their schoolwork and carry out their daily routines. Instead of asking if the offensive behavior caused them to fail exams, skip class, lose sleep or avoid meals (which would have been more in line with sexual harassment’s legal definition of “interfering with work performance”), students needed only to say whether their lives had been interfered with. For a lot of college students, that’s a little like asking if they feel bummed.
The real bummer, of course, will be suffered by the victims of serious campus sexual harassment. Though they are, mercifully, in the minority, there are still professors who trade grades for sex, students who blackmail professors with sex, and frat house creeps who just can’t keep their togas on. To lump their behavior in the same category as “non-contact” annoyances like making jokes or gestures is to undermine the very cause the study purports to illuminate.
Spinning the numbers to find a ruling majority may bring visibility to the issue of campus sexual harassment. But in this case, the real victims are more invisible than ever.
