Recognizing Your Faults

In light of recent events on campus, a great deal of attention has been focused on the epidemic of rape at Harvard and at schools nationwide. It's wonderful to see such a high level of sincere student response to this issue. Some of the reaction has been remarkably well-informed and purposeful, giving us hope for a safer campus environment.

The reactions of other students, however, have displayed an equally remarkable level of ignorance, showing us just how fundamental that ignorance is to preserving the secrecy of acquaintance rape. But even the sentiments and comments falling in the latter category can serve as a starting point for discussion. Questions are being asked, and I'm glad a brave few are searching for answers.

What appears inevitable is that the outrage will die down, the shock will subside and things will return to normal. And given the prevalence of rape on college campuses and the silence that keeps it hidden, that is exactly what should scare the hell out of us.

There's been a lot of criticism regarding The Crimson's coverage of the Jan. 31 arrest of Joshua M. Elster '00 resulting from rape and assault charges. Maybe the paper went too far in revealing facts about the suspect in custody. Maybe it didn't Either way, a great deal of energy has been wasted and misdirected on this question. I don't mean to minimize the injury resulting from any part of this tragedy. But all the personal harm possible from character misrepresentation or even from defamation, whether valid or not, pales in comparison to the life-altering havoc wreaked on a victim of sexual assault, and that's what lies at the heart of this incident.

Rape isn't a crime which allows for nonchalance. Whether it happens after a party, on a date or in the middle of the day, each rape is like a little murder, killing off the person who was there before with persistent emotional trauma, grief and hopelessness, as well with a loss of self-respect, hope and pride. It's hard to find focused campus efforts or even discussions whose aim is to eliminate sexual assault. Perhaps too many people still trivialize acquaintance rape as differing from "real" rape. In fact, it is when the victim knows the rapist, as is reportedly the case 78 percent of the time, that there is a greater sense of confusion, self-blame, betrayal and loss of trust.

All rape is horribly traumatic. But there is something particularly traumatic about being raped by someone a victim knows and had even liked or trusted. The right to say no to sex is a human right, a basic right of control over one's body. But for too many men, it's a right mitigated by circumstances, by how well the two know each other, by how much they've had to drink, by just how much "fooling around" has already occurred. And for too many women, that translates into having the fun and excitement of mutual intimacy turn into the horror of having to plead to be treated as a human being, to plead to save their dignity and self-worth.

Let me bring this notion a little closer to home. One of the most influential and rigorous studies of sexual assault on college campuses was conducted in the mid-80s by Dr. Mary Koss, then a professor at Kent State. Koss found that one in 12 college men admitted to behaviors that fit the legal definition of rape. Applying the results of that study to Harvard, we can expect that just about all of us know someone affected by rape. The problem is that we rarely know we know.

Equally frightening, those numbers imply a disturbingly high number of men who rape--men who are in our classes, in our dining halls, in our labs, in our circles of friends, men who are reading this article. That's a lot of men who believe they can force sex in certain situations, but the word "rapist" isn't being branded on any of their foreheads. They don't seem any different from "regular guys" because they are regular guys. And, of course, they don't see themselves as rapists; in fact, 84 percent of college men who sexually assaulted someone were convinced their actions were "definitely not rape."

There's a notion out there that an act of rape suggests an unstable, psychotic assailant. Not only is this assumption dead wrong, but it is damaging to the victim of acquaintance rape. As long as rape is viewed as the act of a man who temporarily "snapped" or of a demented stranger, how can we expect the victims of acquaintance rape ever to have any real legal or social recourse against their attackers?

The very fact that dates and acquaintances perpetrate the vast majority of college rapes indicates that it is the way men and women are taught to relate to each other which should be on trial.

No one has any easy answers. Education and awareness may generate the most immediate beneficial change, and I would hope sincere efforts to that effect would become a more familiar part of the Harvard landscape. But there are also more fundamental changes each of us can make in our ways of thinking and acting. These changes, though they ask for little effort, would serve as the basis for a lasting commitment to end the assaults which so silently plague Harvard and other American universities.

A 1986 study by UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth found that 50 percent of men surveyed would "force a woman into having sex" if they knew there was no chance of being caught. There exists an unnatural marriage of masculinity to sexual conquest and aggression in the minds of many of our male peers. Surely, the two concepts can be divorced.

How are we socialized to view sex? Do we see it as parallel to human potential, associated with elation, communion, violence, intimacy, connection, empathy, indifference, compassion and cruelty? Or is sex thought of one-dimensionally, as an estranged use of another's body, a selfish act void of communication and reciprocation? Sex without discussion rarely allows for real consent, real sharing or, in other words, real intercourse.

And what about our perceptions of rape itself? Rape victims are often subjected to the subsequent blame of "friends," both male and female. Repeating mantras of "Why were you in his room alone?" or "You led him on, didn't you?" insidiously implicate her as the guilty party. It's an error in perception that both feeds and feeds off the silence surrounding rape. Whether or not we've noticed these attitudes hovering about us--perhaps we even recognize them in ourselves--it would behoove us to be vigilant in our opposition to them. At the very least, the campus environment would benefit from the recognition that such mentalities can be conductive and sheltering to those who commit sexual assault. And recognition is one of the easiest changes we can make.

Let's be daring enough to be self-reflective. For many men, this will require seeing women's humanness, especially in a sexual context, as vividly as we see our own. It will require noticing and confronting the sexist and rape-conducive distortions of women as they're being fed to us. At the very least, we owe it to the brave Harvard women who have so silently picked up the pieces from their experiences and put their lives back together. And at the very least, we owe it to the women who, before the year is over, will have their lives torn apart by the recklessly stupid actions of others.

It's encouraging to see rape defense classes teaching women the skills to handle threatening situations. But we must ultimately work to reduce the threat of rape. Focusing solely on precautionary measures shifts the responsibility and blame from the perpetrator to the victim. Let's see if we can use that legendary Harvard intellect to push rape prevention toward changes in the way we think and behave.

It's interesting to note that book-stores place books on rape squarely in the Women's Studies section, as if rape had nothing to do with men, as if men nothing to do with rape. It is men who rape. Risk reduction can be a women's issue, but true rape prevention must become a men's issue. As long as some men continue to commit such acts of disrespect against women's lives, it will remain at best disingenuous, at worst collusive, for other men to continue pretending it does not happen.

Rape could not regularly occur in a campus environment that destroyed its protective privacy as a "personal misunderstanding" and exposed it as the social disease it is. Maybe in such an environment the next man who tries to force sex would actually leave his mind and snap--snap right out of his socially imposed deafness and hear the word "no" the way it is meant to be heard. Maybe he would realize the woman really doesn't want to have sex, no matter how much he might want her to. It's such a little thing, but it would mean so much.

Edward G. Smith '97 graduated last June with a B.A. in physics. He works for Oliver, Wyman and Company, a financial services consulting firm, in New York City.