Campus culture fosters rape

Editor's note: This is part three in a three-part series about rape at IU.

It’s been three years of recovery for now-senior Mallory Deckard, who reported being raped her freshman year at IU. Up until this year, it was something she thought about every day, as she was often plagued with thoughts of depression and suicide.

“He took something from me so personal,” she said. “You keep thinking, ‘Am I going to go through this every day for the rest of my life?’”

Now, Deckard is a volunteer at Middle Way House in the legal department and plans to attend law school next year to become a prosecutor herself.

“The situation in my mind has been redefined to, ‘I’m gonna get those fuckers who do this to women,’” she said. “I just wanna help this whole situation. It’s kind of given me a purpose.”

Despite the ongoing efforts of rape support services on Bloomington’s campus, colleges, including IU, have become breeding grounds for sexual assault, said Carol McCord, assistant dean in the Office for Women’s Affairs. Along with focusing on how to get more women to report, McCord said the biggest issue is reducing the number of assaults in the first place. While people often examine how the system functions, McCord believes the most important thing is to prevent this from happening. What this comes down to, she said, is a cultural problem.

“I’m horrified by the fact that across the country, when young women choose to go to college that they are, in effect, choosing to increase their risk of sexual assault,” McCord said, adding that men across the country are getting away with rape, not just at IU.

Many men, as a result of the party culture, are encouraged to engage in sexual assault at college, she said.

“Why is it that men believe that a woman who is drunk, passed out or asleep is someone they can have sex with?” she said.

One of the main problems with this culture is that when McCord’s office tries to hand out prevention materials, men are constantly reassuring her they already know what sexual assault means, she said.

“Parents of boys don’t believe they need this information and don’t want to hear it. But in fact, that’s who is assaulting women,” McCord said. “The sexual assaults aren’t happening from guys in the community. These sexual assaults are happening from other students.”


A looser definition

Because rape at parties has become so common on college campuses, Craig Bradley, professor of law at IU, acknowledged this as a reason cases often are not prosecuted.

By definition, rape is sex without consent when: the other person is “compelled by force ... unaware that the sexual intercourse is occurring, or … so mentally disabled or deficient that consent to sexual intercourse cannot be given,” according to Indiana State Code.

Bradley, who was a prosecutor in the 1970’s in Washington, D.C., suggested this definition of rape is too strict to prove in the type of situations that are happening on college campuses. Many states have a broader definition of rape, simply defined as sex without consent, he said. The type of situations often seen on a campus like IU’s, he said, is one in which the victim knows the rapist and is in a party situation. These situations don’t necessarily fit into the Indiana code’s narrow definition.

“Authorities are reluctant to call this rape,” he said. “It doesn’t really sound like rape but it sounds like something that should be against the law.”

Some states, such as New Jersey, make it a crime to have sex without the other person’s consent, thus broadening the definition and making party rape situations easier to prosecute. With this type of code, force does not necessarily have to be proven.

“If it were a crime, but with a lesser punishment, then you’d get more enforcement, I think,” Bradley said. “Because it’s obviously not the same as somebody jumping out of the bushes with a knife.”


Holding responsibility

Even as support programs refuse to blame party-rape victims, the question remains: Should women hold any responsibility in preventing their own rapes?

Most rape support groups emphatically say “no.”

Blaming the victim becomes an issue many support groups such as Middle Way House and the Office for Women’s Affairs try to combat. Students might want to say the woman was responsible for the rape occurring, McCord said, which is problematic.

“He alone is responsible for having that choice,” she said. “Women say to me, ‘It’s not fair that I can’t go out and have a good time socially without the risk of being sexually assaulted.’ Men say to me, ‘It’s not fair that I can’t have sex with a girl without worrying that I could get accused of sexual assault.’”

Yet the IU Police Department takes a different perspective on the issue. Though women aren’t responsible for their perpetrator’s actions, women do often hold a responsibility for being in that type of situation, IU Police Department Sgt. Leslie Slone said.

“If you choose to go out and party with a bunch of folks, you may or may not know, and you choose to dull your senses, then you have to know that that’s a risk,” Slone said. “Does that mean that it’s OK for anyone to do anything to you? Of course not. And no one says that is okay. ... We want students to be appropriately cautious.”

But women should be allowed to go out and party just like men, said Liz Hannibal, crisis intervention services coordinator at Middle Way House.

“Women have a right to feel sexy and to be cute,” Hannibal said. “But at the same time, when you do that, men then can say that’s why I raped you: because you wanted it.”


The root of the problem

Elizabeth Armstrong, associate professor of sociology, conducted a study about rape on IU’s campus from 2004 to 2005. Armstrong, along with co-authors Laura Hamilton and Brian Sweeney, spent a significant amount of time in IU’s residential halls observing trends among college students. What she found out, she said, is that rape education is not necessarily enough. Women often don’t know situations are dangerous for them until it’s too late.

“It doesn’t start with a guy pulling out a gun,” she said. “It starts with when he says ‘Oh I’ll give you a ride home later, wink wink.’”

Freshmen living in dorms often feel the pressure to “go out and have fun and drink,” Armstrong noted in her study, which she published in 2006. Often, this happens at fraternity parties, the study found. Armstrong said the fraternity system is what most needs to change to combat this culture.

“From around 9 p.m. until around 11 p.m., the circular drive in front of our residence hall resembled a rowdy taxi-stand, as dressed-to-impress women stood waiting to be carpooled to parties in expensive late-model sport utility vehicles driven by fraternity pledges,” Armstrong wrote in the study. “Reports from women suggest that the system is more effective at getting women to parties than getting them home.”

In the study, Armstrong described these parties as a way the men gain “sexual access to women.”

Armstrong said it’s not the greek system alone, but how the system is connected to the rest of the University. Because the University isn’t responsible for what happens in the greek houses, they become the go-to places for drinking and parties.

“It’s not just bad frat boys,” she said. “It’s the University administration saying ‘Better it happened there (at the fraternities) than here (at the dorms).’ ... As long as there’s these massive gender inequalities over who has control over the party space and the party resources, there’s no stopping it, really.”


Fixing the system

For incoming freshmen, there are few initiatives in place forcing them to learn what defines sexual assault and rape. Currently, the only mandatory program for new students is a 45-minute presentation. That talk cannot be enough to change “a lifetime of accepted cultural norms,” McCord said.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 90 percent of offenders are men. Because of this, Hannibal reiterated that rape is just as much a man’s issue as a woman’s. Prevention at IU – especially during the first three months of a student’s time here – is a crucial first step, she said. A class on healthy relationships discussing domestic and sexual violence, along with what consent means and how to be safe, is necessary at IU, she said.

As rapes continue on campuses nationwide, McCord acknowledges the current system simply is not working.

What is most needed for the system right now is more funding so more programs can be implemented to educate students about campus safety and rape awareness, she said. But the University has yet to make that a priority, she said.

“It’s an epidemic that our campus shares with every other campus in this country,” she said. “We could work to try to be the leader in changing it.”