Do Colleges Care More About Rapists Than About Rape Victims?

It doesn’t count as a rape unless the rapist has an orgasm: That’s what campus police at the University of Southern California reportedly told a rape victim who summoned them for help after being forcibly vaginally penetrated by another student.

The claim was part of a  larger Title IX complaint filed by USC students at the Department of Education, accusing the university of not taking the problem of rape on campus seriously. Other accusations leveled at the university: That campus police dismissed a victim by saying she should expect to get raped if she got drunk at parties. A victim who was raped by her ex-boyfriend—notably, not by getting drunk at parties—was also reportedly ignored, even though she had an audio recording of the ex admitting to the rape. She was also scolded and told that the university didn’t want to “punish” the rapist, so much as offer an “educative” process, as if rapists rape because they don’t know that rape is wrong. (Research conclusively shows that rapists rape  because they like feeling powerful and sadistic, not because they missed the “don’t rape people” memo.)

If you feel like you've heard this story before, well, that’s not a coincidence. The DOE’s Office for Civil Rights has been overrun with Title IX complaints recently, all telling similar stories: Widespread campus rape being met by officials who are more worried about shutting the victims up and not ruining the reputations of rapists than about making the campus safe for female students. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Swarthmore College, and Occidental College are all under investigation for similar offenses. The  University of Montana recently wrapped up such an investigation and  promised to clean up its act on the issue of sexual harassment and assault. Why does this keep happening over and over again?

Like with the military and its rape coverup problems, university responses to rape and other forms of sexual abuse stem from a larger overall cultural problem: People are afraid of confronting the rapist. It’s difficult for people to square away interpersonal violence with what we understand as “crime.” We imagine the criminal as an outsider or a rage-filled transgressor of social norms. But rapists are usually members of the community just like their victims are. It becomes easy for others in the community, therefore, to contextualize rape not as the violent crime that it is, but as interpersonal “drama.” That, in turn, makes it easier to be mad at the victim for outing the conflict and cause everyone to be uncomfortable than it is to be mad at the rapist for commiting the rape in the first place.

More simply put, it’s often easier to be mad at the person who draws attention to a problem than the person who wants to keep the problem underwraps, even if the latter is only doing so because they’re the ones causing the problem.

You see this dynamic come up again and again, with university officials more worried about how potentially disruptive it will be to eject the rapist from his community than about the damage he’s doing to the community by raping others in it. To make it worse, officials often worry about protecting the university’s reputation, and therefore see the people speaking out as more of a danger than the people committing the actual crimes. It becomes all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “If they just kept their mouths shut…."

The most recent obnoxious example of this happened at Dartmouth,  where students alleged that the university cracked down much harder on anti-rape protesters than on actual rapists. One student, Karenina Rojas, described to Think Progress the social dynamics of this choice: “The fact is that Dartmouth is punishing protesters who are very visible, but won’t punish students who commit assaults.”