As I prepped myself for work this morning, a mind-rattling story, “Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice” (NPR Morning Edition, Feb 24, 2010), came over the radio. (Note: this is the first installment in a longer series. I plan to listen to the remaining installments in the days ahead.)
A story about campus rape and violence isn’t the kind of thing that says, “Good morning, the sun is shining, doesn’t breakfast smell good?”. And it would have been easy to turn the radio off or turn my attention to the morning comics, but I couldn’t. I work on a college campus. Rape and violence are unavoidable, if unwelcome and uncomfortable, facts of campus life.
As it happened, just last night my wife and I had been discussing a student who said (we received this story second-hand) that she was a victim of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of another student on her campus, and she wanted help. We had wondered aloud about all sort of questions. What policies cover abuse? Does it matter if the student is an adult? Who should the student talk to on her campus? What kind of help does the campus provide? What duties and actions need to be performed by the campus officials/faculty that she has already contacted?
A lot of our confusion and ignorance were driven by the mercifully low frequency that these horrors arrive at our door. But, as much as we might wish otherwise, uncomfortable realities barge in. Our job is to help keep our students safe and, when that fails, to help them recover.
Added June 21, 2010 – Yesterday’s Oregonian carried an article regarding sexual assault in the Opinion section: Assaulted and abandoned: sexual assault survivors on campus often are victimized again by colleges. The article took a close look at Reed’s procedures and some recent episodes involving sexual assault.
