I’ve known Kate (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) for a few years, but she is a completely different person now than she was when I first met her. Once a free spirit, she is now mistrusting of others and continuously conscious of her personal safety on campus. “As much as I love it here, there’s always going to be another part of me that hates Duke—just really hates it,” she told me. “It’s not only because of what happened, but because of that mentality that if you don’t have it together and everything’s not going perfectly for you—well, that’s too bad. We don’t care about you.”
Kate’s opinion is not one that is often heard, but is understandable all the same. She will forever associate the University with the night she was raped. On a Last Day of Classes, as she walked the halls of a dorm on West Campus, she was forced onto a table by two undergraduate Duke men and sexually assaulted. She awoke the next morning dazed, confused and unable to fully comprehend what had happened. She felt used, dirty, degraded and disempowered.
“Before this happened, it had never even occurred to me that there was a possibility I could be raped, especially on a college campus,” Kate said. “You go to Duke, and you expect to be around intelligent people who don’t do violent things like this.”
Yet, she’s now part of the often cited statistic: one in four women on a college campus will be sexually assaulted. The gross reality of this number isn’t apparent because as many as 60 percent of sexual assault cases in the U.S. go unreported. Between July and December of 2010 alone, the Women’s Center saw 29 cases of rape or sexual assault, 25 in which the alleged perpetrator was a Duke undergraduate or a recent alumnus. Even this seemingly high number is likely a vast underrepresentation of the actual instances of sexual assault. By reporting, survivors often fear confronting the stigma that had they consumed less alcohol or dressed conservatively, they wouldn’t have been sexually assaulted.
Kate already blamed herself for what had happened, but the thought of the police or the Undergraduate Conduct Board also blaming her stopped Kate from reporting the incident. She felt that her story could potentially be leaked to the media, and she would be unable to psychologically move on from the incident.
Perhaps the most difficult and salient aspect of dealing with the aftermath of the assault for Kate was moving on with her academic life. She met with her academic dean once after LDOC to explain what had happened and asked for extensions for her exams. Yet, one of her professors was unresponsive to her request. Kate was unable to explain her situation to her professor, and after being forced to take the exam, her GPA plummeted.
As Kate dealt with her academics the following summer, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness and a lack of support from Duke. After the initial meeting, Kate’s dean didn’t invite her for further talks about her academic struggles that resulted from the assault. Feeling helpless, Kate approached her dean about possibly transferring schools but received little support.
“When I said I want to transfer, she basically just said ‘OK,’ and it felt like Duke didn’t care that this had happened or cared that I was here,” said Kate.
After receiving counseling from the Women’s Center, however, Kate began the process of rehabilitating. She credits the center’s support as a main reason for her wanting to make her story public. In doing so, she hopes that Duke students will recognize that sexual assault is a serious problem on campus.
Essential to this understanding is learning how to recognize potentially dangerous situations and intervene effectively. This year, the Women’s Center started a program, Prevent Act Challenge Teach (PACT), which teaches just that. Additionally, the University has been actively working on the Gender Violence Prevention and Intervention Task Force, a group intended to investigate how to reduce the number of incidences of gender violence on campus.
Despite this progress, Kate continues seeing other women, and at times, men, struggle with sexual assault.
“To think that it’s still going on around me makes me so angry and frustrated,” she said. “You would think that once would be enough, but it just keeps happening over and over again. And it’ll keep happening until we step up as a community and say, ‘No, this is wrong.’”
We, as students, administrators and faculty members, all ought to recognize the pervasiveness of sexual assault incidences on campus and urge our community to create an environment that is supportive to survivors. Whether you know it or not, it is possible that a friend or acquaintance has been sexually assaulted while at college. Visible or not, sexual assault is one of the most violent and underreported crimes on campus. It’s not just a statistic, but a grim reality that exists at Duke—one that will only be resolved when we collectively confront it.
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