The latest in a shamefully
The case has several sadly familiar elements: The defendant, who has since withdrawn from the university, was an athlete; the assault involved consumption of alcohol and a fraternity party.
The victim and many other people are outraged at what they deem to be a lenient sentence that they believe was shaped by the defendant’s status as a privileged white student and champion swimmer at an elite university. A petition to recall the judge in the case has attracted more than 240,000 signatures, according to The New York Times.
Earlier in the week, the Valley News carried a Washington Post story reporting on a new study that produced startling — to our minds, at least — results. It was based on an online survey taken by 379 male undergraduates at a single, large public university in the Southeastern region of the United States. It sought to gauge sexual activity and attitudes. The study found that more than half the men who played an intramural or intercollegiate sport reported having coerced a partner to engage in sexual activity (38 percent of men who were not athletes also applied verbal or physical pressure to engage in sex). Of course, a note of caution must be sounded because the survey results were limited to a single university with a Division 1 athletic program. But, as the Post noted, they do support prior research suggesting that intercollegiate athletes commit a disproportionate share of sexual violence on campus. Many social scientists attribute this prevalence to the isolation of athletes from the rest of the university community and the aggressive, hyper-masculine culture of university sports.
Of equal interest were findings related to the beliefs of those who acknowledged coercing sexual partners: They endorsed rape myths, such as “If a woman doesn’t fight back, it isn’t rape,” and embraced traditional views of gender roles.
That such views are not confined to males in large public universities in the Southeast can be inferred from a Post analysis of federal data showing that nearly 100 colleges and universities had at least 10 reports of rape on their main campuses in 2014. Brown and the University of Connecticut were tied for the most at 43 incidents; Dartmouth was second with 42.
So, no, we have not “come a long way, baby,” as the egregious cigarette ad from the 1970s put it. In fact, one can reasonably wonder whether such retrograde attitudes are in fact more prevalent now among men than they were in the ’70s or ’80s. There are both men and women who attended college in those years who think so.
Of course, campus sexual assault also exists in a broader cultural context, one in which far too many people use their power and influence simply to gratify their own desires or fulfill their own purposes, without regard to how other individuals are affected. This occurs not only in relations between the sexes — although it is more fraught in that realm — but also in business, politics and social arrangements, where exploitation and coercion are, if not the norm, at least not unusual. When Donald Trump denigrates women or defames Muslims or makes fun of a disabled reporter, he is using them as props to further his political ends, not dealing with them as human beings. Universities are clearly not doing their job when it comes to educating young men about the enormous damage they do when they sexually assault a woman, but the larger society also bears responsibility for such dehumanizing behavior.