When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, I learned that sexual assault was an everyday thing at Duke. I taught for six semesters. Every semester at least one student came to my office and told me about her experience of sexual assault here. Always the assailant was a fellow student the victim had known at least casually. I learned to keep Kleenex in the office. But I never learned to consider this normal.
Part of that was personal. During those years at Duke, my sister was raped in Durham, also by someone she knew. She had let him into her house to use the telephone, he had asked her for a beer and she had given him one. This was not a matter of "mixed signals"-her assailant knew she was a lesbian, and she pushed him away hard. The rape crisis center warned of the challenges of obtaining a conviction: she had reported the attack immediately, but she had opened her door and given him beer. Devastated, she did not press charges. She could not face seeing him again, not even in court.
When it happens to your sister, you think hard because you watch the wasted years of anguish as well as, in my sister's case, her brave path toward healing. You find that sexual assault affects your whole web of friends and loved ones for years afterward. I will never forget holding my infant daughter, watching my sister sleep, and praying in bitter anguish that this would never happen to my baby girl. You think this is something that happens to other people, but you find that it happens to you, too.
And when it happens to your students, year in, year out, you think harder because you start to see that it's literally an everyday thing on campus.
My first job after getting my Duke Ph.D. was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for 10 years. Wisconsin is the un-Duke: a public school in the Midwest with 40,000 students. But this matter of women getting sexually assaulted by classmates did not change. It was not just a Duke thing.
One of my students at Madison was raped by a highly touted running back and one of his friends. She had dated him before. She let the two men into her apartment. The violence that followed seared her soul. I walked her to classes for two weeks afterward because she was afraid to leave home. The district attorney thought it was "too confusing" to prosecute. I watched her recover, graduate, complete her doctorate and land job offers at major universities across the country. But her pain is still there, eight years later. Not that it matters, but so is mine.
My feelings are not the point, but these stories are as commonplace as coffee cups on our campuses. According to the U.S. Justice Department, 20 to 25 percent of U.S. college women experience sexual assault during their college careers. Ninety percent of them knew their assailant. Three-quarters of the time, either the victim or her assailant or both had been drinking. The majority of rapes on campus go unreported because of the trauma, shame and fear.
Duke may be worse than some schools with respect to sexual assault. The hard partying and hookup culture breeds conditions in which rape thrives. But it happens everywhere. I attended several meetings at North Carolina Central University in the early days of the lacrosse fiasco, and was struck by what NCCU student organizers always said: this is not about Duke, because we have serious problems with sexual assault here, too. And always the NCCU students expressed concern for the civil rights of the accused and insisted that we cannot rush to judgment. I don't recall that being reported in the media.
The media focuses on controversy, not the everyday fabric of our lives. False reports constitute 2 to 3 percent of rape cases-the same as other crimes. Meanwhile, Justice Department statistics reveal that on a campus with 6,000 co-eds, there will be roughly one rape per day. It is not "normal," it is simply ordinary. Meanwhile, nearly half of college men acknowledge having used coercive tactics to have sex: ignoring protests, physical aggression, forced intercourse. Most perpetrators insist that this definitely was not rape. Problems of campus culture are not confined to Duke.
The human tragedies behind the statistics must be seen in light of a larger world that undervalues women and treats them as sex toys and eye candy, things to be bought and sold. And our culture blames women when they are attacked. What was she wearing? Did she offer him a beer?
The problem is that we have come to see the staggering rate of violence against women as a normal part of life. But it's not normal. And we all suffer from it, and we all pretend it is not happening.
Timothy Tyson is a senior research scholar of documentary studies and a visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at the Divinity School.
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