University of Virgina Suspends ALL Fraternities Following Rolling Stone Article

On November 19th, Rolling Stone published a deeply researched article, called A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA, that related the horrific - and not uncommon - experience of Jackie, a college freshman at UVA who was brutally and violently raped over a period of 3 hours by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house.

Jackie had taken three hours getting ready, straightening her long, dark, wavy hair. She'd congratulated herself on her choice of a tasteful red dress with a high neckline. Now, climbing the frat-house stairs with Drew, Jackie felt excited. Drew ushered Jackie into a bedroom, shutting the door behind them. The room was pitch-black inside. Jackie blindly turned toward Drew, uttering his name. At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.

"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party.
"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more – her date, Drew, and another man – gave instruction and encouragement. She remembers how the spectators swigged beers, and how they called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket. She remembers the men's heft and their sour reek of alcohol mixed with the pungency of marijuana. Most of all, Jackie remembers the pain and the pounding that went on and on.

It only gets worse from there.

Kudos to Rolling Stone for investigating and reporting this story - this is what responsible journalism looks like.

Fortunately, the story went viral. The revelation allowed many more young women to come forward with their stories. Here are two of their stories - see Rape at UVA: Students Say Jackie Was Not Alone for the remainder.

Sadly
I was also raped at UVA in a frat house in 2013. I reported it through the Sexual Misconduct Board at the University and had it tried in 2014. My evidence included texts calling for help, police testimony consistent with mine, and numerous witnesses. But the University still found him innocent. I found Nicole Eramo very unfeeling as well — sociopathic, almost. She later told me she didn't believe the studies that showed rapists, in particular, were repeat offenders of this heinous crime. It was a very negative experience to go through — to be raped and then told that your offender was innocent. I even left clothing as I ran out of the frat house that the University gathered as evidence and it was never returned to me. Not that the clothing was important. It wasn't. The police discouraged me from pursuing it criminally, saying that I didn't have enough evidence to win. They also told me that I should be cautious about pursuing this formally, since court proceedings and news articles related to my case could spread publicly on the Internet. For privacy reasons (I didn't want future employers to Google me and see that I brought forward rape charges), I decided to pursue justice through the University. But the outcome of this process was painful and disappointing. I will never stop wondering why UVA so often expels students for academic lying, cheating, and stealing but has never once expelled a student for rape.

SK
I am so sorry for what happened to you, Jackie, and I wish I had been brave enough my freshman year to report what happened to me. But fearing the very same things – backlash, no consequences – I chose to stay quiet. I support you, I am proud of you and what you did is going to change lives. You are forcing an administration to admit its wrongdoings, and you are getting national attention, which will help to stop this misogyny, violence and pain from affecting more people. I know that feeling like a martyr is never going to feel as good as the girl you were before this happened to you, but your struggle has significance and you are needed in this world.

Then the unexpected happened on Friday (Nov. 21), the UVA administration suspended ALL fraternities and their activities until the beginning of the Spring semester in January, at which time a panel of students, faculty, alumni, and "other concerned parties" will offer recommendations for how to stop these incidents.

Here is the beginning of that article, which includes the full statement by the University's President.

UVA Suspends Fraternities Following Rolling Stone Campus Rape Investigation

"The wrongs described in Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us to reexamine our responsibility to this community," UVA president writes in letter suspending fraternities

Joel Hawksley/For The Washington Post via Getty Images - Graduating students stand to have their pictures taken in front of the Rotunda at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. on May 18, 2013.

By Rolling Stone | November 22, 2014

Following Rolling Stone publishing Sabrina Rubin Erdely's harrowing report "A Rape on Campus," which detailed a pattern of sexual assault among the fraternities at the University of Virginia, many women who attended UVA emailed Rolling Stone sharing their own similar stories. After "A Rape on Campus" went viral, the school itself acknowledged the Rolling Stone article by promising to make changes to their student sexual misconduct policy. Now, the University is taking even more stern action.

President Teresa A. Sullivan announced in a letter to students and alumni that the school's fraternities have been suspended effective immediately. The suspension will last until January 9, 2015, which marks the beginning of the spring semester. In that time, "we will assemble groups of students, faculty, alumni, and other concerned parties to discuss our next steps in preventing sexual assault and sexual violence on Grounds," Sullivan writes.

In my opinion, the only way this is going to change is to take drastic steps - the Fraternities at UVA should remain closed for the rest of the school year, with the students placed in residence halls are allowed to move into off-campus housing.

The administration needs education on rape, date rape, toxic masculinity, and the rape culture that exists on campuses around the country, but especially in some fraternities. The people who turned a blind eye to these events in ignorance or in fear of bad publicity need to be educated on how alcohol and drugs, toxic masculinity, and entitlement and privilege can lead to these type of gang rape situations.

Further, any future rapes that are reported and verified will result in the permanent closure of a given fraternity. Period. 

This needs to be the basic policy on EVERY campus in the country, not just UVA.

Date and Acquaintance Rape - Presentation Version and Full Version

 

Here is the presentation (shorter version as presented and a longer version) I gave at the Tucson YWCA yesterday as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. These are hosted by SlideShare.

I posted this at Integral Options Cafe but, as I discuss in the presentation, we need to spend more time educating boys and men on treating women with respect, not on teaching women how not to get raped. Teaching women to be afraid of men is not the answer - and it's clearly not working.


Full presentation:


Presentation as given at the YWCA:

ESPN's Jameis Winston Coverage - College Athletes and Sexual Assault

It's refreshing to read that ESPN actually dealt with the Jameis Winston situation in terms of sexual assault (he was not charged with any crimes in the alleged sexual assault case, which is not say that he did not do it, only that the prosecutor did not have enough evidence to bring charges, let alone get a conviction).

The panel handled it as an actual news story, not as a sports story - and they did not get caught up in the "star worship" that so often flavors their coverage of athletes.

We will never know what happened that night, but we do know that college athletes sometimes have a sense of entitlement that, when fueled by alcohol, can result in the rapist's creed, "no means yes." Witness the following list: Morehouse State (2013), U of Michigan (2013), Fresno City College (2006), U of Montana (2012), UConn (2011/2013), Vanderbilt (2013), McGill University (2013), Santa Ana College (2009), Temple University (2012), Notre Dame (2010), Arizona State (2013), and West Virginia (2013), to name just a few.

All of the situations linked to above involved football players. In fact, while male student athletes account for only 3% of the college population, athletes are responsible for 1 in 3 sexual assaults.

Here are a few more stats to boil your blood (National Coalition Against Violent Athletes):

• A 3 year study shows that while male student-athletes comprise 3.3% of the population, they represent 19% of sexual assault perpetrators and 35% of domestic violence perpetrators. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• One in three college sexual assaults are committed by athletes. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• In the three years before 1998, an average of 1000 charges were brought against athletes each year. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• In 1995, while only 8.5% of the general population was charged with assault, 36.8% of athletes were charged with assault. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• The general population has a conviction rate of 80%. The conviction rate of an athlete is 38%. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• A new incident of athlete crime emerges once every two days - that does NOT include crimes that were unreported in the media. (NCAVA)
• 84% of the public believes colleges should revoke the scholarship of a player convicted of a crime. (ESPN SportsZone Poll)
• 20% of college football recruits in the Top 25 Division I teams have criminal records.
• A college rapist will have raped seven times before being caught.

On college campuses, this is the reality of rape culture - it is perpetrated by and protective of athletes. In light of all this, it was nice to see ESPN handle the situation with the appropriate gravity.

For more background on this issue, see When sex meets NCAA athletics (Al Jazeera, Oct 2013), 5 Ways Sexual Assault Is Really About Entitlement (Salon, Oct 2013), 40 Years of College Football's Sexual-Assault Problem (Mother Jones, Dec 2013), and Shocking: College Rapists Almost Always Get Off the Hook (Alternet, Oct 2010).

ESPN Delivers Powerful Segment On Sexual Assault During Jameis Winston Coverage

By Travis Waldron on December 6, 2013

Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston - CREDIT: AP

Amid wall-to-wall coverage of the fact that the Florida state attorney’s office decided Thursday not to file sexual assault charges against Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, ESPN found time to deliver a powerful panel discussion that dove into the other side of the case: the difficulties women face in coming forward after rapes and sexual assaults and the ways in which such cases are handled by investigators and other law enforcement officials.

The panel, anchored by ESPN’s David Lloyd, featured ESPN columnist and TV personality Jemele Hill and ESPN radio hosts Colin Cowherd and Paul Finebaum. Lloyd began the segment by reciting statistics about the rarity of false rape claims — between 2 and 10 percent of rape claims are false, he said, citing the National Sexual Violence Resource Center — and after a brief talk about Winston’s Heisman Trophy candidacy, the panel shifted entirely toward the topic of sexual assault. Hill, who wrote last week about the Winston case and a family friend who tried to sexually assault her when she was a child, talked openly about her case and the difficult, intrusive process that faces women when they report rapes and sexual assaults to authorities.

“That is sort of my concern here, that because you have a high-profile athlete, because of the way this case was handled and appears to be mishandled, that people will get a very inaccurate portrayal about what happens during this reporting process,” Hill said, adding that she faced “very intrusive questions” when she reported her case. Women, she said, “are almost re-victimized all over again” in these investigations, and this process “did a real disservice to the woman who was accusing Jameis Winston and certainly a disservice to Jameis Winston as well. I hope this will shed some light that this is still, despite all the awareness that has been made about sexual assault, is still a very difficult process for anyone coming forward with these types of very serious allegations.”

Lloyd then mentioned the Steubenville rape case, which was badly mishandled by authorities. Cowherd slammed the Florida state attorney for not appearing to understand the gravity of the case as he laughed through his afternoon press conference. Finebaum criticized the prosecutor for “grandstanding” and slammed Winston attorney Tim Jansen, whose own press conference was filled with plenty of veiled attacks on the accuser, for making “a mockery of the whole system, particularly with women.” Finebaum also blasted the Tallahassee Police Department’s mishandling of the case. All in all, it was a solid panel that dove into a side of the subject much of the media, including ESPN, has ignored in the weeks since news of the Winston investigation broke. Watch it here:



ESPN has faced deserved criticism for moving its hard-hitting news show Outside The Lines to ESPN2, where it commands a much smaller audience than it used to on ESPN, and the fact that it waited until SportsCenter had shifted to ESPN News to broadcast the Hill-Cowherd-Finebaum panel discussion is a little disappointing because it would have garnered a significantly larger audience on one of the two main networks. The mere presence of the panel, though, was a smart move from ESPN, which had covered every other aspect of the case down to the minute details, and Hill, a sharp sports commentator who also regularly weighs in on the bigger impact sports can have, was a perfect choice given her past writing and experience with the subject. Cowherd and Finebaum were strong too (and I had previously criticized Finebaum and ESPN for switching to Heisman talk even before the charges were officially announced).

While ESPN’s coverage mostly followed a basic formula: it featured two reporters on the ground in Tallahassee, analysis from legal expert Roger Cossack, and reactions from Winston’s camp, Florida State, and the accuser’s attorney. It spent significant time on the football implications too, which while seemingly trivial in light of a sexual assault case is to be expected given that ESPN has an interest in Jameis Winston the football player. ESPN will broadcast both the Heisman Trophy ceremony and the BCS National Championship game, both of which should include Winston. ABC, ESPN’s sister company under the Disney umbrella, will broadcast the ACC title game Saturday. And frankly, football coverage, not talk about sexual assault, is what people want when they turn on ESPN.

But as a news organization, ESPN also has a responsibility to provide not just what people want to hear but what is important to hear too. And I thought, given the dynamics of a breaking news day and the fact that it clearly wanted to focus its coverage on the specific details of the case, the ESPN News panel was a solid way of doing that. It could have been longer, it could have avoided the same trappings of Heisman talk, and it could have been in a more prominent broadcast position. But it was a strong segment, and I hope it leads to more coverage of an issue that remains a serious concern in college football and other sports on ESPN’s other news shows (like the aforementioned Outside The Lines) in the not-so-distant future.