no girls allowed

When a university does not address sexual assault, it is essentially hanging up a "no girls allowed" sign. By "address" I mean any number of actions - maintain a rape crisis center and rape crisis counsellor team, ensure campus is well lit and safe, provide facilities and operational support for a campus safety escort service (i.e. walkers and vans), make sexual assault defense and prevention programs available for all students, promote sexual assault awareness campaigns among the campus and greater campus community. All of those things take funding and in today's climate of profiteering universities, funding is the last thing they are going to put into a problem they'd rather not acknowledge in the first place.

Take Yale. (please)
Today, Yale was in the news. A Yale student who says she was sexually brutalized after a party dubbed "Camp Yale" is accusing the university of not enforcing underage drinking laws or doing enough to warn students and faculty about sexual assault.

Oh the Hartford Courant. So willing to give the benefit of the doubt despite the legality of the situation. It's not a matter of the student "say(ing) she was sexually brutalized". The woman's rapist plead "no contest" to the charges. Why continue to play the "who says" and "alleged" game after a conviction has been secured? Why do it if we are going to unequivocally declare the Duke lacrosse players innocent without their having been found innocent at trial.

But I digress. I read the Yale lawsuit article with interest, translating from the original misogynist text as I went. I think this is an interesting tactic this woman is taking in suing the university. My own experience at universities is that they do NOT like to address the fact that sexual assault occurs on their campuses or among their student populations. It is frustrating to watch as someone who has been largely indirectly affected by sexual assault. This woman was assaulted by a man who had been allowed to stay on campus after a prior similar assault
The lawsuit says that Yale should have known about Korb's violent tendencies, after he allegedly bit another student. The suit accuses Yale of glossing over previous incidents of sexual violence and failing to educate students about the problem.

Wait, they knew he bit someone before? What the hell were they thinking? Were the Yale administration waiting for him to go buy some guns and shoot up the school? Ah but I forget. Only sensible people would consider a college aged boy who goes around BITING girls to be in any way pathologically fucked. And sensible, when it comes to assault on women and the men who assault them, is not the common approach. The immediate Virginia Tech response to the first two killings showed the common thinking on it: Providing the boy only bites/stalks/assaults(bites?) girls, he's not going to be considered a threat to the community as a whole. Hence no need to throw him out of school, alert the community, mandate counseling, or treat him as any kind of threat. He's a personal problem, a disturbance at worst. No reason to rock the boat or worry people needlessly.

But I have to say, what struck me was this little nugget.
Responding to years of complaints, Yale last fall opened a rape crisis center that combines counseling and prevention programs under one roof.

Allow me to underscore the important part of that sentence:

Last year Yale finally got around to opening
a rape crisis center.

LAST fucking YEAR?!

Here's a random thought - I can't help thinking that had there been a means for support and empowerment of the victims of sexual assault before LAST fucking YEAR, perhaps we as a country would have been spared some men's rise to power as political figures.

The thought that Yale only just LAST fucking YEAR opened a rape crisis center makes me seethe. I want to go put a brick through something Yale-ish. It's so indicative of the problem though isn't it? It's a perfect illustration of what marginalized groups face in US culture these days, especially in the academic culture. A flat out denial of a problem, a complete disavowal of any possibility of racism, sexism, ageism, anti-gay belief (gotta have a new word btw, a post for another time), classism (oh god a huge one) on the one hand while ensuring there is NO way to record or address any instances of the afore mentioned "-isms" available to students, staff, or faculty. The way harassment, discrimination, bigotry and other systemic oppressive behaviors are treated on campus is to allow the denial to dictate funding and programming - no sexism = no need for a sexual harassment office. A belief in no rape = no need for a rape crisis center. And thus there are no records. Or falsely low records of occurences of discrimination, harassment, rape.

How many complaints do you think are likely to result when the university model is to say "Look, it's not that we don't believe you. It's just that we only take complaints written in orange ink" and then refusing to buy orange pens.

The unsurprisingly low number of official (orange inked) complaints are used as further evidence that nothing like that happens here, further cause to not fund such facilities and programs, and the whole thing perpetuates itself.

I am glad someone is suing. Yale's obvious lack of concern for the reality of sexual assault is tantamount to a civil rights violation. It wouldn't be if rape didn't happen. While we'd all love to believe this it is not only incorrect, it is wrong.

I'll be sure to follow the lawsuit as well as I can. I don't know that it will be easy since following the story means it needs to make it into the news as it progresses and I have no faith the news outlets will pick it up to report on anything beyond the novelty of a woman having the chutzpah to sue over a climate which made the sexual assault more likely, which one might argue facilitates and enables sexual assault.