Responsibility and repercussions

In the paradoxically blistering and dripping afternoon heat of August, as you proudly tack a whiteboard to the door of your newly arranged dorm room, you bid adieu to your parents. Their faces reflect their conflicted feelings of pride and terror, as their child is about to embark on a four-year journey that will change her life in unimaginable and unpredictable ways. She might exchange her childhood desire to become a doctor for the equally eyesight-damaging career goal of becoming a lawyer. Or she might eschew the post-grad route altogether and opt instead for a lucrative career in finance or consulting, or a slightly less well-remunerated job as a teacher or a Peace Corps volunteer. Whatever transformation ends up happening, parents and students alike can rest assured that students will come out the other side as different people, for better or for worse.

It is the University’s responsibility to simultaneously foster students’ exploration of life-changing alternatives and to ensure that these pivotal transformations occur in as safe an environment as possible. There is no doubt that this is a difficult balance to strike. After all, most college students are legal adults, and many are of legal drinking age for at least the last year of their undergraduate career. But it is precisely students’ situation in this nebulous period between adolescence and adulthood that necessitates a brand of oversight that provides guidance and protection when requested and exists comfortingly and respectfully in the background when it is not.

Vanderbilt University students on Thursday filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, alleging that the university has not adequately responded to sexual assault on campus. Similar to complaints made by students at Yale University and Swarthmore College, Vanderbilt students alleged the school had not fulfilled its obligation under the Clery Act to ensure that cases of “domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault or stalking” be provided a “prompt, fair and impartial investigation and resolution.” In September, a former Vanderbilt football player accepted a plea deal for his involvement in the aggravated rape and battery of an unconscious female student in June. In exchange for testifying against his ex-teammates, Chris Boyd can stay in school and even get his record expunged if he stays out of trouble for a year.

I understand the practicalities of the deal. I understand how useful it is for prosecution to have Boyd testify against his former teammates. I even understand that Boyd’s involvement only in covering up the crime makes him a good candidate for such a plea deal. He escapes a felony conviction and a two-year sentence, and the prosecution gets a stronger case. What doesn’t make sense is the fact that Boyd is allowed to continue at Vanderbilt and possibly even continue as a member of the football team. Essentially, assuming Boyd can live a PG-13 life for a single year, he will get off scot-free. In the meantime, the girl whose rape he helped to cover up must struggle with the repercussions of a half-remembered event that has fundamentally changed her life.

Even though reports such as Yale’s second climate campus assessment show that the obligations imposed by the Clery Act have contributed to a healthy sexual climate at schools, the unfortunate reality is that providing access to reporting mechanisms and fair trials does not ensure that victims of sexual assault and rape recognize their own need to take advantage of such services. This misrecognition could be the product of several different cultural realities, from the lack of sexual education class in middle and high schools across the country, to the double standard of responsibility for intoxicated people. Although universities across the country have come a long way in recognizing the prevalence of sexual assault on their campuses, a double standard of responsibility still prevails. The double standard is usually correlated to gender, where drunk women are held responsible for the aftermath of their drunken escapades, while drunk men are usually allowed to blame their actions on an alcohol-induced loss of inhibition.

Under most criminal statutes defining rape and sexual assault, intoxication negates the ability of either party to consent. This de jure reality, however, stands in contrast with the stark de facto reality of the hookup culture of undergraduates, in which alcohol and intoxication play a central role. It is this reality that makes its participants reason that, while they might have technically been sexually assaulted or raped, surely the strict consent provisions of the law were not meant to apply to their case.