TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603363.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 8.0 KB | 166 lines

                                                                                BEHAVIOR, Page 54

COVER STORIES

The Clamor on Campus


Date rape is one crime that colleges are finding too hot to
handle but impossible to ignore

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Cathy Booth/Minneapolis


    Universities have always been America's approximate
monasteries, embracing codes of behavior too stringent for the
outside world. Deans aim to enforce a set of rules that will
guide young people from the safety of their family to the
freedom of the rest of their life. Some students arrive barely
knowing how to drink and sleep, much less drink and sleep
together; they have little sense of what is appropriate and what
is expected of them. So with a pitcher of beer in one hand and
a dorm key in the other, society's children set out to discover
who they are.

    What many learn first is that within a cloistered
courtyard, rape is an easy crime: doors are left unlocked,
visitors come and go, and female students give classmates the
benefit of the doubt. College officials have led the effort to
raise consciousness about the problem through rape-awareness
weeks, video series, pamphlets, training manuals and posters:
DATE RAPE IS VIOLENCE, NOT A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION. But when a
really nasty incident occurs, the instinct too often is to
handle it quietly and try to make it go away.

    Katie Koestner was a virgin when she was allegedly raped
by a student she had been dating at William and Mary College.
The dean took her to the campus police, but steered her away
from the outside authorities, she says. When she asked for an
internal investigation, the accused man got to question her
first, and then she had her turn. At 2:30 a.m., after 7 1/2
hours, he was found guilty of sexual assault. Days later she
learned his penalty: he was barred from entering any dorm or
fraternity house other than his own for four years, but he was
allowed to stay on campus. "The hearing officer told me that
this is an educational institution, not a penitentiary," she
recalls. "He even said, `Maybe you guys can get back together
next year.' I couldn't believe it."

    The man later wrote in the campus newspaper that he had
suffered the "terrible consequences of being falsely accused."
He said he had been dating Koestner for three weeks; one night
they slept together, without having sex, and then early the
next morning, "without any protest or argument on the part of
Ms. Koestner, we engaged in intercourse." He was found guilty,
he said, not for physically forcing Koestner to have sex, but
for applying emotional pressure.

    The debate grew more heated when Koestner went public with
her story. Since then she has received stacks of letters and
calls of support. Women raped decades ago phone and thank her
for saving their daughters. Though the school defends its
procedures, vice president W. Samuel Sadler says that "Katie's
coming forward has personalized the issue and led to a more
intensive discussion, and frankly improved input."

    That discussion goes on at colleges everywhere. "It seems
like date and acquaintance rape is the rule rather than the
exception on campuses today," says Frank Carrington, a
consultant for Security on Campus, a nonprofit group based in
Gulph Mills, Pa. "And the way the universities treat it is to
cover up and protect their image while a tremendous outrage is
building."

    Nowhere is it building faster than at Carleton College,
Minnesota's prestigious private liberal-arts school and, in
1983, one of the first in the nation to establish a
sexual-harassment policy. In the language of the university's
judicial code, "rape" doesn't officially exist. School
administrators call it "sexual harassment" or "advances without
sanction." But those phrases don't seem very useful when Julie,
Amy, Kristene and Karen try to describe what happened to them.

    In October 1987, Amy had been on campus just five weeks
when she joined some friends to watch a video in the room of a
senior. One by one the other students went away, leaving her
alone with a student whose full name she didn't even know. "It
ended up with his hands around my throat," she recalls. In a
lawsuit she has filed against the college, she charges that he
locked the door and raped her again and again for the next four
hours. "I didn't want him to kill me. I just kept trying not to
cry." Only afterward did he tell her, almost defiantly, his
name. It was near the top of the "castration list" posted on
women's bathroom walls around campus to warn other students
about college rapists.

    Amy went to the dean of students, whom she had been told
she could trust. "He told me it was my word against my
attacker's, and that if I went for a criminal prosecution, the
victim was basically put on trial." So instead she picked the
gentler alternative -- an internal review, at which she ended
up being grilled about her sexual habits and experiences. Her
attacker was found guilty of sexual assault but was only
suspended, because of a dean's assurance that he had no "priors"
other than "advances without sanction."

    Julie started dating a fellow cast member in a Carleton
play. They had never slept together, she charges in a civil
suit, until he came to her dorm room one night, uninvited, and
raped her. Weeks later, she says, he ripped her dress at a play
rehearsal and grabbed her exposed breast. Still she told no one.
"If I had been raped by a stranger, I would have told someone.
But to be raped by a friend -- I began to wonder, Whom do you
trust?" She struggled to hold her life and education together,
but finally could manage no longer and left school. Only later
did Julie learn that her assailant was the same man who had
attacked Amy.

    Two other students, Kristene and Karen, claim to have
suffered similar experiences at the hands of another student;
all four of the Carleton women have filed suit against the
college. They claim the school knew these men had a history of
sexual abuse and did nothing to prevent their attacking again.
Even after the men were found guilty of sexual harassment, they
were allowed to remain on campus, and the victims were barred
from warning their dorm mates under the college's privacy
policy. The local police chief says that in the past six years,
no Carleton official has brought an assault victim to the
department.

    Carleton President Stephen Lewis Jr. explains that he is
acutely aware of the problem of rape on campus, which is why the
sexual-harassment policy was created in the first place. He
believes the four students objected not so much to the
procedures as to the outcome. All were advised of the option of
going to the police. "These women chose to go to the university
hearing board but didn't like the result, and now they're
suing," says Lewis, who arrived on campus in the fall of 1987,
after two of the alleged rapes took place. "We understand
they're upset, but that doesn't mean they're right. I accept
fully that Amy and Kristene believe they were raped, but the
hearing boards concluded that they hadn't been." If the men, who
were found guilty of lesser charges, had committed forced sexual
intercourse, he says, they would have been expelled. "It's like
a court of law. When the accused is acquitted, you can't then
sue the jury."

    This month Representative Jim Ramstad of Minnesota filed
a bill in Congress -- the "campus sexual-assault victims' bill
of rights" -- that guarantees students the right to have
assaults investigated by police and to live in housing "free
from sexual or physical intimidation." Under a law already
passed, beginning in 1992 colleges will be required to make
campus crime statistics public. That will give parents and
prospective students a chance to make informed decisions about
the risks they are willing to take with their safety. More
important, the law may encourage colleges to be more vigilant
about crime in their midst and more protective of young people
in their care.