Public Discourse about University Negligence on Sexual Violence Cases
Sexual violence on university campuses has always been a pressing issue, but the nuances of university policy and action, or lack thereof, have consistently been lost in the woodwork. When talking about the topic of university negligence regarding sexual violence, it is evident that most discourse is facilitated through news articles, opinion pieces, and social media. With the arrival of the digital age, survivors of campus assault are becoming more outspoken about their trauma which has caught the attention of news outlets. Thus, the public has become more emotionally responsive and willing to contribute to the discourse with opinion pieces and social media posts. This has sparked more conversation about this issue than ever before.
The terminology change from “victims” to “survivors” happened as more people affected by sexual violence started reporting and sharing their experiences. According to an article written by Rahila Gupta on the independent global media platform Open Democracy, using the term “victim” was a strategic move in the 1970s and 1980s when activists were setting up refuges and centers in the United Kingdom to deal with domestic and sexual violence. Activists framed these women as victims of male violence in order to win public sympathy to their cause and government funding for their services. Describing these women as victims was their way of pinning the blame on their abusers and simultaneously answer why women did not just leave abusive relationships. Activist chose to portray the trapped victim, rather than a survivor with the ability of making choices. These terms are constructed in ways that place them at opposite poles of an agency continuum. The push to use the term survivor started when feminist politics took issue to the alleged devaluing of women’s capacities (Gupta). The mobility that is connotated with the term inspired others to reclaim their trauma and gain the agency they lost from their assault.
The creation of the internet and various social media sites have made connecting with others and sharing information much easier. 2016 was an exceptional year of discourse regarding sexual violence. Many people broke the silence around sexual assault with tweets, posts, and shares. Social campaigns based on hashtags such as #pussygrabsback, #Ibelievesurvivors, and others ignited Twitter. These hashtags would also appear on Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter’s 140 character limit prompted more people to hesitate to share their personal experiences while allowing other users to share experiences to their own social circles. Through the use of hashtags, tagged posts and pictures, people are able to congregate on one page, simplifying the process for social media users to find a community or a realm of public discourse.
News outlets are more interested in covering survivors speaking out against their university and/or perpetrator because they know that these stories are great human interest pieces and shed more light on an issue that many were hesitant or ashamed to talk about before. Usually, higher profile stories involve shocking details and high profile survivors that go above and beyond to get a public reaction. A very popular topic in the news was Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight). Sulkowicz attended Columbia University in New York City and was assaulted in her dorm room in 2012. After her school refused to sanction her perpetrator with expulsion, she created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) which was a work of endurance performance art for her senior thesis as part of her visual arts degree. Beginning September 2014, the piece involved her carrying a 50 pound mattress, similar to the one she was raped on, wherever she went on campus. Sulkowicz said the piece would end when her alleged attacker was expelled from or otherwise left the university.
Another major component of the public discourse surrounding this topic is The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape crimes on U.S. campuses, institutional cover-ups and the brutal social toll on survivors and their families.
Despite any flaws or accomplishments, it is clear that pieces like Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight) and The Hunting Ground arrived at an interesting moment in the national conversation on campus sexual assault. It is also evident that news outlets produce many articles about this issue and the frequency of the coverage has also alerted a specific group of the public to pay attention, state and national legislators. On February 26, 2015, one day before the theatrical release of the film, a bipartisan group of twelve U.S. Senators, accompanied by the documentary’s lead subjects, Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, reintroduced the Campus Accountability and Safety Act. The act, originally introduced in July 2014, would require universities to adopt standard practices for weighing sexual charges and survey students on the prevalence of assault. Even the Obama administration took action by pressuring schools to show they take sexual assault charges seriously and dole out appropriate punishment with the launch of the “It’s On Us” initiative, “an awareness campaign to help put an end to sexual assault on college campuses”.
Sexual violence occurs on every college campus, but no administration is taking responsibility because they are afraid that alumni would retract their donations and more people would be hesitant to attend. Earlier this week, the Daily Californian, a student-run newspaper at University of California Berkeley, published an article that revealed that at least 113 UC faculty, staff and contractors violated system wide sexual violence and harassment policy over the past three years at all UC campuses. This information was in hundreds of pages of UC documents that the Daily Californian obtained through a California Public Records Act request. These papers detailed years of unwanted sexual advances, inappropriate comments and physical assaults. Seven percent of all cases released involved sexual assault. Twenty-five percent of those who violated policy were faculty and thirty-five percent of the complaints were made by students.
The predatory situation is “rampant” according to Kristen Glasgow, a UCLA graduate student who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the university against professor of history, Gabriel Piterberg. Glasgow further underlines the severity of the situation by saying that she knows more women who have gone through it than not. The article explains that most of the documents have never been publicly released and that many documents were heavily redacted. Subsequently, the UC Office of General Counsel made a statement regarding the release of the documents that acknowledged that the UC system has room for improvement, but “there are several competing public interests that must also be balanced under the Public Records Act or other relevant statutes.” Discourse like this is incredibly influential because it allows the public to be able to scrutinize and hold those in power accountable. The documents shed light on the full scale of sexual misconduct across the UC system which are invaluable to past, present, and future students. This crisis has led administrators to resign, students to protest, and the UC president to rethink the way the university handles complaints due to the hundreds of people that have been informed about the negligence.
While Buzzfeed is predominately used for online entertainment purposes rather than a news source, it has released a lot of first hand exclusives about university negligence on sexual assault cases. An example would be the University of California, Santa Cruz case where undergraduate student Luz Portillo was sexually assaulted by a now terminated professor.During the interview, Portillo felt that going public “allowed me to reclaim what happened to me. I wasn’t going to be another anonymous person.” By adding a name and face, a more human aspect is emphasized which leads to more empathy from readers.
In some cases, anonymity may be more beneficial because it emphasizes the idea that the survivor could be anyone – possibly someone in the reader’s own life. The most outspoken social media post created by a survivor from Stanford University last year in June when BuzzFeed published a letter from a woman known as Emily Doe to her rapist, Brock Turner. For 7,200 words, Doe addressed Turner directly and ripped into the defense’s claim that he was only guilty of drinking too much — that rape culture and alcohol were to blame, not the man who stuck his fingers in an unconscious woman while she lay on the ground.
In just four days, the piece received more than 11 million views. With each click, Turner was increasingly pegged as the poster boy for white male privilege — a role intensified by the media’s treatment of him, noting his status as a college athlete not just in articles, but in headlines. They would cite his swim times in one breath and how he raped Doe in another. Millions of people became emotionally invested because Doe’s detailed letter and anonymity made it easy for people to step in her shoes. News outlets shone the spotlight on this case for months, and when the judge handed him a six-month jail sentence instead of the six years requested by the prosecution, men and women showed their frustration by going to the world’s largest forum: social media. They tweeted #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence with everything from “Bruce Willis’ hair” to “the years of damage the victim will deal with.” The hashtag has thousands of posts and more keep showing up every day – something that is very normal on forums.
While there is no reputable discourse that justifies sexual violence, there are disagreements regarding who should prosecute the case as well as the specific sanctions questioning of the survivor’s character. These skeptics raised concerns that the systems being put in place at schools to adjudicate sexual violence cases are grossly unfair to the accused and are overall unfit to handle this serious of a charge. While most of the content surrounding this subject is supportive of the assaulted and outraged at university administration, there is a significant amount of discourse that questions the validity of having schools judge sexual violence cases and assert that “moral panic is clouding our ability to rationally assess the problem.” Many students who are assaulted are persuaded into taking their case to colleges. By choosing this option, they believe that their schools can yield a quicker path to justice than going to law enforcement since a college can discipline a student after finding a preponderance of evidence that a sexual assault has occurred. Winning a conviction in a criminal case requires a far higher burden of proof, which is part of the reason why only a minority of sexual assault cases involving acquaintances lead to arrest, let alone a conviction.
However, there have been cases that have proved this to be false such as The Huffington Post article by Tyler Kingkade about a Bard College senior on December 2015. Allison, a fake name that was used to protect the survivor’s privacy, was incredibly distraught that the student whom Allison claimed had raped her several weeks earlier was allowed to stay on campus and take classes even though he was found guilty. The lack of punishment enforcement was contradictory as Bard College had determined that the assailant had violated the school’s sexual assault policy which should have resulted in a minimum repercussion of suspension. After a near death situation, Allison filed a police report and found that local police did not cast doubt on her claims and took proactive steps to investigate. The default system that adjudicates sexual violence cases in schools is Title IX, a portion of the United States Education Amendments of 1972. It contains many problems such as the 12-month statute of limitations for filing claims. This limitation is very problematic for survivors who are not ready to immediately report sexual assaults for various reasons. Another problem with Title IX is policy can quickly get outdated. For example, when a UC Santa Barbara student tried to report her assault in 2014, she fell prey to not only the statute of limitations, but also the technicality of sexual assault being classified as only harassment in 2013 when her assault occurred. This made it unclear what sanctions are appropriate even if she was within the allocated time frame.
The Washington Post wrote an article about how many universities are hesitant to expel students even if they are found guilty of sexual assault. Using the University of Virginia as a case study, The Washington Post collected Federal data on college discipline that suggests that guilty students “are much more likely to be suspended and then allowed to finish their studies.” In fact, the University of Virginia has expelled no students for sexual misconduct in the past decade, a record that has intensified scrutiny of the public flagship university now at the center of debate on campus sexual assault. The university has been severely criticized since it has dismissed dozens of students for academic cheating in recent years, but none for sexual assault. The framing of this article leads the reader to believe that the school finds cheating to be more cause for harsh consequences than sexual assault. This proves the argument that universities are negligent due to the fear of having an even more prominent negative public reputation.
Referring to the Stanford case from this summer, a complaint was made by four different women recently that accused the school of being “deliberately negligent in handling sexual-assault claims” as reported by The Cut, an online section of NY Mag devoted to modern women’s issues and interest. After an investigation, the man that three women had accused of violent assault was found guilty and “banned from campus for 15 years and required to seek professional counseling for sexual harassment and sexual violence, among other consequences”. However, two women asserted that before banning the perpetrator from campus, the three womens’ cases were highly mismanaged and the article includes quotes about how these women felt about Stanford’s severe and “objectively offensive” indifference. Stories like this are not uncommon and can be easily found with a simple scroll through Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or any other search engine. Such accessibility was unheard of before the internet, superseding the effects of the printing press.
Sexual violence on university campuses has been an issue for years, but recently it has garnered much more public discourse. The internet especially has played a fundamental role because it gave those affected by campus assault an outlet for their voices that were being suppressed. News outlets have taken more notice to lawsuits being filed by students against their universities and proceed to shine the media spotlight on their cases, thereby also turning the heads of their readers and getting them emotionally invested. Social media has united people while efficiently labeling their posts for ultimate sharing purposes. This readily available information sharing has sparked more conversation about the nuances of preventing sexual violence and advocating for survivors since the discourse surrounding the issues is more focused on empowering those who have been assaulted and pressuring universities to be less negligent.