Before we get started, last week I mentioned a Senate Judicial Hearing on rape cases in the USA. Amanda Hess liveblogged the hearing, so if you didn’t catch it you can check out her summary.
The Georgetown Voice has a really wonderful must-read feature up about four women who were raped or sexually assaulted at Georgetown, and the struggles they faced and still face in recovering from the trauma and dealing with the school’s judicial process. Author Molly Redden deserves a lot of credit for writing such a powerful piece that tackles so many different aspects of the issue, including the troubling fact that Georgetown currently does not have a sexual assault education program that reaches all of its students. And kudos to the members of GU Men Creating Change who have been pushing the school to adopt such a program.
In other activism news, last year a group of students at Wheaton College began the process of demanding that the school reform its sexual assault policy, and this semester a student and staff review panel will begin examining the policy!
Since a lot of schools cut back on sexual assault programming/services due to budget constraints, I was happy to see this article about how the University of Iowa is not going to stop operating its blue emergency phones. Security says they have only received six “legitimate” emergency calls in the past three years, but the last one from this summer seems to make the case for keeping the system: two women called in fear of an attempted sexual assault and the alarm scared the attacker off.
On Sunday, Jezebel posted a story about two pieces in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter—an editorial in which one male student complains about “fat chicks” at parties and one (curiously in the “news and features” section?) in which another male student lists some “advantages” of having sex while drunk, which includes the fact that girls become more “submissive” when drinking and that drinking too much allows you to forget your stupid behavior. I invite all of you to comment on the second article (the first has been taken down) to tell the author and the paper how they’re contributing to a culture that condones sexual assault. Also, that what they wrote and published ISN’T NEWS. Remember what I said that about student journalism? [Update: so, the "no fat chicks" one was supposed to be satire. No apology on the drunk sex one though. In other news, no one on college campuses seems to know what the word "satire" means.]
Finally, the worst part of my weekend was reading this article from the University of Georgia student newspaper about the connection between alcohol and a recent sexual assault. It begins: “Deciding to have only one or two drinks downtown may feel limiting to students, but it could prevent them from becoming victims of rape, according to University and law enforcement officials.” And it doesn’t get better from there. You know what would prevent people from “becoming victims” of rape? (You know, because it’s something that you become, not something that is done to you, of course). If other people didn’t rape them. But once again, it’s always the potential victim’s responsibility to monitor their own behavior without any mention of how we change perpetrator behavior. Nice job, ya’ll.
