Seems like everywhere you look in the media today, another college sexual assault scandal is erupting on a college campus somewhere. I think Jerry Sandusky and Penn State got the ball rolling for most people. The reality is that people are starting to talk about sexual abuse – a subject that most people wouldn’t even discuss in private. It’s sort of a domino effect in social awareness more than an epidemic of sexual abuse. The problem has always been there. It’s just that we are talking about, and victims are feeling empowered to come forward and be heard.
Tip of the Iceberg
For a long time the estimate was that only 15% of sexual assaults get reported. I’d like to believe that the percentages of disclosure are going up, and not the incidents of abuse. One in three girls and one in five boys will experience some form of sexual abuse by the time they are 18. College sexual abuse is somewhat less well documented due to a variety of factors, Peer pressure, alcohol, and the expectation of being an adult all contribute to a murky sexual environment. He said, she said and songs from the Dead Kennedy’s set the tone for a complex problem. And lets not forget the ever forbidden, student teacher relationship. What’s appropriate varies from college to college. The numbers are just going to keep going up as more victims come forward, and more feel safe to do the same.
The Challenge of Campus Police
In some respects campus police are part of the problem and the solution. It’s been a long time since I was in college, but back in the day campus police were more concerned with getting you safely back to the dorm to sleep off whatever you had been doing. Question about laws that might have been broken weren’t generally asked unless someone was seriously injured or worse. Kids will be kids, so just try to make it as safe as possible for them.
Those days started coming to an end in early 1986 when a freshman at my school was raped and murdered. It made the national news, was followed by a series of lawsuits and through the dedicated work of her parents, a new law came into being. The Clery Act required schools to start tracking crimes on college campuses. It was a giant step forward, but a rape on campus was still little more than a checkbox on a form.
Fast forward to today and you are seeing schools across the country being hit with Title IX lawsuits over how they handled victim reports of sexual assaults. It’s time for campus police to make the leap to case worker. In the past some campus police were one step above mall security, now they need to be better trained in victim services than some local police departments. Victims are going to continue to come forward in record numbers, and campus police need to be ready for the volume.
Protect the Institution
What’s a college president to do? A couple of police reports, a lawsuit or two, and then a story on the front page of CNN. There is public pressure to fix the problem, but even if the problem is getting better, more sexual abuse victims are coming forward to share their experiences. The harder you try, the worse it seems to get. Eventually the scales will tip, but that’s still about 5 years away. Meanwhile endowments start shrinking, and the college board starts talking replacement.
Surely the problem occurred on your watch, so if you can’t fix it, they will bring in someone that will. And good luck getting a similar job at another school after getting the ax for this kind of public failure. Unless you are actively trying to cover things up, and that has happened, it’s really just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Advice to College Presidents in addressing sexual abuse
Learn the facts about sexual abuse and educate your board.
Take the position that as bad as the problem is portrayed in the media, it’s actually several times worse.
Start building programs for a larger victim population than you currently know about.
Educate the media and take the position that your school expects numbers of abuse reports to go up because you are creating a climate where victims can feel heard and respected and that appropriate action will take place for all incidents reported.
Require all students and staff to take a class/seminar on sexual abuse and misconduct
Establish a certification program for domestic violence or sexual assault advocacy
Restrict or create strict policies around student/teacher relationships
Go beyond your Clery Act Reporting requirements with a case management system geared toward victim services
Don’t dismiss allegations just because the accused is the pillar of the community, Nobel loreate, or Pulitzer prize winner. These people actually have a higher degree of committing sexual abuse than the general population.
Don’t try to bury anything. It will come back to bury you.
If you need help rolling this out, get help. Feel free to contact me.
Establish procedures for investigations and involvement of local police
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
The rape conviction of two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio is an interesting microcosm of a variety of social and legal problems regarding sexual abuse and it’s definitions. Take away the names and the location and you have a scenario that is played out in communities across the country a hundred times a week. Kids trying to be popular, Kids wanting to be with the popular kids, kids getting drunk, and kids having sex.
What defines rape?
One of the biggest challenges, state to state, is that definitions for sexual offenses are all over the map. Reduce the age under 18 and it gets even more complicated. There are risk of injury charges that may or may not be sexually related. Some state’s have obscure terms like “Trovers”, or “Impairing the Morals” in their sexual offenses. Then there are qualifiers such as being within 5 years of the same age, consent ages, level of understanding, ability to grant consent, degree of planning, etc.
It’s entirely possible to have nearly identical physical acts treated completely differently from a legal perspective within the same state based on the relationship of the participants. And state to state, the same act and circumstances can have wildly different outcomes legally.
To drunk to ….
If you remember the band the Dead Kennedy’s, you can fill in the rest. Is it a double standard to say that someone was to drunk to give consent, but those accused are not to drunk to understand their intent? Adding alcohol or drugs to any situation and good judgement goes out the window. Add it to sexually curious teenagers who have no concept of what legal definitions are and you have a recipe for a mess.
What’s age got to do with it?
Most states have come to realize that what is criminal for an adult, is often just incredible stupidity for teenagers. Clearly there are exceptions. Bbut sexual related incidents can be some of the most challenging because they can go either way. There is a huge difference in the psychology or a 16 year old who forces a 9 year old to perform a sex act on them, compared to to a 17 year old performing a sexual act on a 15 year old girl at a party. The first is probably someone with a problem, the later may just be violating a statute on consent. Both could be labeled as sex offenders and end up adjudicated.
Depending on the state, your juvenile record and sex offender designation may end at 18, 21 or some other time determined by the court. Again, no standards state to state. Still there is a general consensus in the juvenile justice world that with proper treatment, juvenile mistakes don’t have to become adult convictions. So does someone under 18 have to live with their mistakes as an adult because they were labeled a sex offender years before? It’s a complicated issue that doesn’t have a consistent answer.
We can’t let this get out!
Whether it is a star football player, a local politician, or a beloved teacher, people will act to protect the status quo. They don’t want their heros to be guilty of things, so people will go to great lengths to put the genie back in the bottle. The victim in this case is already getting harassed on line. In our case, one of the families had their mailbox and post thrown through the window of their car (it wasn’t open). They got the hint and moved out of state.
Victims often feel the full weight of a community when the natural order of things is upset. I don’t think Spock (Star Trek) meant “the good of the many outweighs the good of the one” for situations like this. But the same logic regarding acting in the public good, also applies to self protection where reputations, ways of life, or championship games are at stake. It’s wrong, but it is human nature.
Fixing the problem
People are more or less the same anywhere you go. Drunk teenagers are not a phenomenon of one town or state. Sex abuse or rape doesn’t change much from state to state either. Laws need to have common definitions and outcomes in every state. With that as a foundation, we can do a better job of educating ourselves, and teenagers specifically, of where the boundaries are for appropriate sexual behavior. There will probably be another Steubenville, but if we all had the same legal interpretation of rape, it would be easier to attach the right labels to what happened. And it would be easier to take the right steps to ensure everyone gets the treatment/punishment that they deserve.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
As titles go, this seems rather absurd. Can you imagine being raped, reporting it, and then being told you have a personality disorder and then losing your job. Stories of sexual assault get stranger the more you hear. Who would do this to a person. The frightening answer is the U.S. Military. Countless woman are diagnosed with a personality disorder when they report sexual assaults within the military chain. This unusual diagnosis basically says it was a pre-existing condition which preceded service admission and both disqualifies them from further military service, and in most cases makes them ineligible for services resulting from the abuse.
The following was obtained by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic under a Freedom of Information Act request.
In the Army, 16% of all soldiers are women, but females constitute 24% of all personality disorder discharges.
Air Force: women make up 21% of the ranks and 35% of personality disorder discharges.
Navy: 17% of sailors are women and 26% of personality disorder discharges
Marines: 7% of the Corps and 14% of personality disorder discharges
Gender Bias
This hasn’t been tracked specifically to sexual assault reports, but it does paint a biased picture. CNN has been following the lives of many of these women. The story is always pretty much the same. They report the abuse and as part of their evaluation they are treated as liars and separated for having a personality disorder. Aside from the humiliation, many of these women are finding themselves liable for repaying signing bonuses plus interest.
The story is similar with sexual harassment. Many years ago a friend of mine filed a sexual harassment complaint against her boss. The shit storm that came down on her both forced her out of the military and seriously damaged her health. I’ve witnessed more than a couple instances where the institution protected itself. I say it that way, because it is rare that any one person could exercise this level of control. It exists in the military, churches, school systems, and companies.
The system wants normal restored, and disruptive influences are not tolerated. Sexual abuse is not a disruptive, reporting sexual abuse is. The challenge is to get to the point where disruptive, becomes part of the normal. This has been true of concepts like the earth being round, equal rights, and civil rights. People who try to bring the concept to light are persecuted and often even killed. What speeds the process of enlightenment is awareness. So spread the word.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse victim situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
CNN recently reported that military sexual assaults at our military academies was up 60% over last year. I’m probably one of the few people that read this and thought it was potentially a good thing. Here’s the logic. Awareness increases reporting. A few years ago, the Hartford public schools started asking children if they had been sexually abused and the number of reported cases went through the roof. I believe we have a similar example here.
Scary Stuff
This is the scary place for any organization. People assume that the reported quantity of something is pretty reliable. Murders, robberies, kidnappings are generally around 100% reported. Sexual assaults on the other hand tend to hover around 15-20% . The reasons tend to be pretty standard: fear of not being believed, social pressure, embarrassment, fear of retaliation, etc.
Add in the pressures of a Military Academy and the reported percentages are probably lower than national averages. Since people’s perception is that whatever number is reported is 100%, the public opinion poll says there is an increase in incidents. In reality, it’s just an increase in reported incidents. The hard part is educating people on the difference.
I can’t say for certain that this is what is happening at the academies, but I would put money on it. This is the cycle that organizations go through. I’m sure someone in a position of power is taking the literal view of things and is probably targeting the Director of Sexual Assault Prevention, Major General Hertog. I hope she can take the heat long enough to educate any critics that may be out there. The biggest challenge to fixing the problem is getting people to recognize exactly how big the problem is.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse victim situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
Sexual abuse takes on many different dimensions. Outside of the developed world it often takes forms that are so common that they actually shape many cultural aspects of developing countries. These girls need your help too. One thing that parents of sexually abused children eventually have to come to grips with is that they often can’t help their own children as much as they would like. They can make difference in the lives of others though.
Child Marriage
Child marriage is considered by many to be legal child abuse and legal sexual assault. Many states allows girls as young as 13 to be married with their parents permission. In the case of many religious groups this is also without the consent of the girl. Many times these are cases of payments to families to cover up rapes or similar situations.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse victim situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
Recently the India Times reported a sharp increase in rapes in India. ” Incest rape cases have increased by 30.7%from 309 cases in 2008 to 404 cases in 2009 as compared to 0.3% decrease in overall rape cases. Crime experts say the highest number of rapes in the country is incest rapes,although they are often not reported”
When is an increase not…
So is this an actual increase, or is it an increase in awareness? As people become more aware the number of reported cases often goes up. Several years ago a local school district tried to be proactive in identifying sexually abused children, so they started asking kids questions. The number of reported sexual assaults went way up. The negative press prompted a disappointing solution to the problem – stop asking. The program went away, and the number of sexual assaults reported went down.
This school district continues to have one of the highest dropout and delinquency rates in the state. It also has a high mortality rate before age 25. The abuse hasn’t gone way, it just manifests in another way. And the cost to the community is high. I can only wonder what would be happening if the program had continued and the community had dealt with the abuse that was actually happening.
Let us know if we can help you dealing with your family’s sexual abuse situation. For ideas to get started please check out our book on what to do during the early days after disclosure.
