The moment when November 12 turned scary is still blurry.
It was Friday, and a sophomore was running down the hall of her dorm, trying find the perfect earrings to go with her pink lipstick. This was the night that guy, the one she sat next to in her introductory writing class last year, was finally taking her out. To dinner. Off campus.
They had been friends, or maybe more like casual acquaintances, for about a year. Her friends had met him, and in late-night games of “do, dump or marry,” his name always came up. When he IM-ed her about dinner tonight, she knew this was her chance. It would be just the two of them.
Dinner was great. Then they met up with their group of about 10 friends. Six shots and two hours later, she was ready to take the guy to her room. “That’s just the way these things go,” she said. “I was drunk, and I knew him, and I liked him.”
The sophomore woke up the next morning alone, hungover and with a deep burning feeling in her crotch. She went next door and told her friends she had sex with the guy. A virgin until that night, she remembered telling him no. She could not recall telling him yes.
She told the police. She went to the doctor for an emergency medical and evidence-gathering exam. She told an officer everything she remembered.
After a brief investigation, she said the police told her there was not enough evidence for a trial. There was nothing she could do.
“I was raped, and I am dealing with that,” the woman said. “I know who did it and I still see him. He’s still friends with people I know.”
The Chronicle does not identify victims of sex crimes. The man is not being named because no charges have been filed.
Going into that November evening, the sophomore, who attends Columbia University, never expected she was putting herself at risk. After all, the man she brought back to her room was a friend and he was a student. His ID card could have gained him access to her commons room. She knew better than to bring a random guy home with her.
“I never thought,” she said, “about safety.”
Familiarity of accuser and assailant is precisely what makes acquaintance assault—by far, the most common form of sexual violence—difficult to report and even harder to prosecute. In 2004, the Duke University Police Department received reports of six sex offenses and two rapes. In 2003, there were six sex offenses and one rape reported.
They know the number of actual assaults is much higher.
“We don’t have many reported to us. It’s a sad thing because if this is going on, you would like to know about it,” said DUPD Maj. Phyllis Cooper. “Date rape is the one that occurs the most, and it’s the one that people don’t realize.”
A Duke-specific study has never been conducted, but academic studies at similar collegiate institutions have found that about one in six women will be the victim of sexual assault during college.
Although many women will not regard themselves as victims, studies that began in the 1980s used descriptive language questionnaires to reveal rapes and sexual assaults that were never reported. Since then, multiple studies have yielded comparable results.
“It’s really hard to think about somebody that you know and that you care about hurting you,” said Jean Leonard, coordinator of Sexual Assault Support Services at Duke’s Women’s Center. “Sexual violence is so normalized in our culture. A lot of these guys are going to give you a totally different story, and I bet they’re going to believe they didn’t assault anybody.”
In recent years, advocacy groups at Duke and across the country have worked to change the culture that tolerates a gray area between sexual assault and consensual sex. As far as the law is concerned, rape and sexual assault carry equal punishments. Sexual crimes that cause serious personal injury or employ a deadly weapon are punishable by life in prison without parole.
Most instances of acquaintance sexual assault are considered second-degree rape and the maximum punishment is 50 years in prison, a fine or both.
Reconstructing the crime
On March 3, a Duke student reported to police that she went on a date with a man who does not go to school here. The two of them were supposed to go to dinner at 6 p.m., but instead, they watched television in her dorm room.
According to a police report, the man forced himself on her against her will. She reported the rape to DUPD at 1:13 a.m. Friday.
After DUPD conducted a full investigation, it turned the evidence over to the district attorney’s office.
Leonora Minai, senior public relations specialist for DUPD, said the prosecutor decided there was not enough probable cause to try the case.
University police said the woman did everything right in reporting the rape. DUPD began investigating the report as a second-degree forcible rape.
Plainclothes investigators and crime scene technicians combed the room for evidence with discretion and the help of University administrators, Cooper said. “We don’t come up with blue lights and sirens,” she said. “It’s not like banging on the door: ‘Let us in!’”
The woman went to the emergency room and had a medical exam.
Police interviewed anyone who might have information about the evening so that officers and lawyers could reconstruct what happened and corroborate it with evidence. The sooner a victim of sexual assault calls the police, the more likely officials are to find physical evidence. Cooper said victims should not shower or wash their clothes and they should leave the room as it is.
“In date rape, we know who the person is,” she said. “If you know who the person is, that’s just not the end of it. You still want to collect evidence.”
Evidence collected can be used in a criminal case or in a private investigation, but many times the facts are not enough for a court to accept. Still, officers and staff members at SASS underscored the need for victims to come forward—both for them to get help and to store evidence in case the victim wants to pursue further action.
“It’s Duke’s commitment to believe any student who comes forward,” Leonard said. “Even the process of moving forward through the system, it’s not for everybody. For most survivors, they’re just trying to get by and heal.”
When evidence isn’t enough
The problem with prosecuting such cases is that to convict an offender, the state must prove sexual assault “beyond a reasonable doubt,” law enforcement officials said.
“It’s a very hard in a criminal case, when you have one person’s word versus another, that the burden of proof is so high,” said Assistant District Attorney Tracy Cline, who handles most sexual assault cases in Durham County. “That’s hard for us to prove that when everything else involved in the evening is consensual, this one act was not.”
She noted that many victims continue to have contact with the people who assaulted them after the incident. For example, they get a ride home from a party in their assailant’s car or try to talk to the person the next day.
Juries, Cline said, have a difficult time understanding why a victim of sexual assault would associate with her attacker. That problem, she said, does not negate the crime. “It’s hard to educate a jury on the mind and the circumstances of a person who has been raped. It’s not a logical person,” she said.
Leonard said about 45 students come to SASS each year seeking help dealing with a rape or other sexual assault. The majority of people who come to her are reporting incidents that occurred months and even years before.
Afraid to disrupt social norms or deterred by a perceived stigma, students try to deal with the aftermath of assaults alone or without University intervention. But, Leonard said, the stress of the incident wears on victims, and many decide to seek help.
SASS offers counseling services, help navigating legal and administrative systems and other support such as with adjusting academic deadlines. Help is available to victims at any time through SASS and through student peer educators. All reports of sexual assaults are confidential, and the University does not force students to name their assailants.
More students report sexual assault at the start of the school year, when alcohol-soaked parties and hook-ups are more common. At the end of the semester, more students also seek help as they realize that depression or other effects of an assault have interfered with their schoolwork, Leonard said.
Other victims believe they are fine until memories of the incident are triggered. “What often happens is people see their assailant,” Leonard said. “With an acquaintance assault and on a campus as small as Duke, you almost always run into your assailant.”
Even among reported assaults, however, few students want to involve the police, making legal action impossible.
Duke steps in
That leaves dealing with most cases of sexual assault in the hands of the University.
SASS, the University-run resource for sexual violence, was formed about 12 years ago and recently expanded from one full-time staff member to two.
In 2003, the University changed its sexual misconduct policy to encourage more students to come forward. It created a smaller panel of the Undergraduate Judicial Board to hear allegations of sexual misconduct and revised the language of the policy to increase specificity.
The new policy also establishes the proof status as “clear and convincing,” making it easier for a perpetrator of sexual assault to be found responsible by the University than by the government. Stephen Bryan, associate dean for judicial affairs, said the board must be roughly 75 percent certain a non-consensual sex act occurred.
Disciplinary action could include suspension. The University does not release the name of the accused student, even if he is found responsible. It is recorded on the student’s disciplinary record, but that is erased after eight years.
This year, about four students have gone through the process, and Bryan said some students have been found responsible—a result much rarer before the revision.
But the Duke process is only applicable if the accused is a Duke student.
“Duke’s sort of coming off of a period of time when students did not have a very positive opinion of how Duke handles sexual assault cases,” Leonard said. That mentality is changing, she noted. Support services have expanded and culture is evolving.
The peer education program has ballooned to include students trained in preventative education and support counseling, and Men Acting for Change, an all-male group working for culture shift, has grown substantially.
As more people learn about the resources through in-dorm sessions and publicity campaigns such as Sexual Assault Prevention Week, which began Monday, more students are coming forward for help.
“No policy is the answer,” Bryan said, “but it’s a tool that could help change the culture.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.