Unsafe in the Ivory Tower

The Sexual Victimization of College Women

Bonnie S. Fisher, Leah E. Daigle, Francis T. Cullen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412954778, 9781412954761
• eBook ISBN: 9781483314532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

An unprecedented look at college women?s risks of and experiences with sexual victimization

Unsafe in the Ivory Tower examines the nature and dimensions of a salient social problem—the sexual victimization of female college students today, and how women respond when they are, in fact, sexually victimized. The authors discuss the research that scholars have conducted to illuminate the origins and extent of this controversial issue as well as what can be done to prevent it. Students and other interested readers learn about the nature of victimization while simultaneously gaining an understanding of the ways in which criminologists, victimologists, and social scientists conduct research that informs theory and policy debates.

Key Features

• Provides detailed information about sexual victimization on college campuses today
• Introduces broad lessons about the interactions of ideology, science and methodology, and public policy
• Integrates current data, research, and theory, based on the authors? national studies of more than 8,000 randomly selected female college students

Intended Audience

This supplemental text is ideal for courses such as Sex Crimes, Violence and Abuse, Victimology, Gender and Crime, Sociology of Violence, Sociology of Women, and the Sociology of Sex and Gender in departments of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and women?s studies. It is also useful for those involved in studying or creating public policy related to this issue and for those interested in sexual victimization on campuses generally.

1

The Discovery of Sexual Victimization

In the public’s mind, the college campus retains the image of an “ivory tower.” It is often said that students graduating from college are now entering the “real world,” which implies that campus life is detached from the hard obligations and unpleasant experiences found beyond the school’s boundaries.When a heinous crime occurs—a coed is slain or a shooting rampage occurs such at Virginia Tech—it is shocking not only because of the nature of the offense but also because of the context in which it transpires. Colleges are supposed to be safe havens—places in which young adults mature through scholarly study and by leading social lives in which risky youthful indiscretions, such as drinking too much, do not have enduring consequences. Tragic victimizations thus are unnerving and prompt us to wonder how such things could ever happen “here.” Campus crimes have broader disquieting implications as well. After all, if someone can be victimized in the ivory tower, can the rest of us be certain of our safety in our own homes and communities?

The ivory tower stereotype further shapes how serious campus victimizations are explained. These events are not seen as being bred by the college environment itself— as one might say about the crimes whose roots are deeply implanted in the disadvantages and disorganization found in inner-city neighborhoods. Rather, campus crime is typically attributed to individual pathology—that is, to a “disturbed” student who goes on a rampage or to a criminal intruder who ventures onto the campus to victimize the innocent. These offenders are treated as newsworthy precisely because they are perceived as the exception to the rule—as anomalies within the pristine ivory tower of the college campus.

Stereotypes, of course, not only reflect but also distort reality. In particular, the image of the pathological offender diverts attention from the way in which students’ victimization might flow from the everyday routines of college life. Marcus Felson (2002, p.12) reminds us of the fallacy of assuming that crime is always “part of a larger set of social evils, such as unemployment, poverty, social injustice, or human suffering.” His routine activity theory suggests that in most settings, it is risky to fail to provide an “attractive target” with an appropriate level of “guardianship.” There usually are enough “motivated offenders” located across society to take advantage of such a situation (Cohen & Felson, 1979). This is one reason that theft is prevalent on college campuses (Fisher, Sloan, Cullen, & Lu, 1998). Unthinking students leave books and cell phones unguarded and, when departing their residence hall rooms, leave the door unlocked if not open. Not surprisingly, their property may well be missing when they return (see, more generally, Mustaine & Tewksbury, 2007).

More significantly, this insight helps us to understand why college campuses are social domains conducive to students’ sexual victimization, including rape. There are times when coeds walking alone at night are sexually assaulted by a stranger. But beyond these disturbing crimes, the risk of female students’ victimization is ingrained in the very fabric of normal college life. Higher educational institutions are places where large numbers of males and females come into daily contact not only in the classroom but also in social settings—in bars, in fraternity or sorority houses, in residence halls, and in apartments at the school’s edge. Encounters in these settings are characteristic of most students’ lifestyles and might lead to much-welcomed flirting, dates, and intimate relationships. But predictably, this routine, everyday activity also may lead many women into situations—such as being alone in a room with a male student—where they are, to use Felson’s terms, an attractive target with no guardianship. In these circumstances, women risk facing unwanted sexual advances that can escalate into assault if not rape. Scholars have used the terms such as acquaintance rape and date rape to describe this type of rape victimization.

This book explores how sexual victimization makes women unsafe in the ivory tower. When female students embark on a college career, they bear the unwarranted cost of the threat and reality of being raped, sexually assaulted, harassed, and stalked. For many years, this cost remained hidden from public view. Victims were left to suffer in silence; their voices were not heard and their pains were ignored.

As we show in this chapter, however, the sexual victimization of women, including on college campuses, gradually was “discovered.” This discovery was hastened by highly publicized prosecutions that raised consciousness—both in society generally and on college campuses—about sexual victimizations in which the perpetrator was not a stranger but known to the victim. Scholars, starting most notably with Mary Koss, also played an integral role in providing empirical data showing the prevalence of female students’ victimization. In particular, the finding that many females were being raped sparked demands that colleges do more to protect their coeds. This claim also triggered a countervailing movement, led mostly by conservatives, that attributed the attention accorded women’s victimization to a feminist plot to make college campuses politically correct. These commentators accused researchers, such as Koss, of misreading, if not fudging, their data so as to invent a problem that did not really exist.

Thus, in the pages ahead, we trace this debate—this “culture war”—over women’s sexual victimization. This discussion is the broader context that surrounds any research, including ours, into how college students’ bodies are violated by others.As we move through the remainder of this book, we try to push ideology aside and present empirical evidence on the nature, extent, and consequences of sexual victimization on the nation’s campuses. In so doing, we show that rape and other forms of sexual victimization comprise a real problem that warrants attention and appropriate efforts at prevention.

Before proceeding, let us pause briefly to clarify terminology. First, we are interested in the sexual victimization experiences of female students across postsecondary institutions—from 2-year schools to universities with graduate programs.We use various terms synonymously to refer to this universe of institutions. Most often we call them colleges, but at times we utilize terms such as universities, institutions, and schools. Second, we employ the term sexual victimization to refer to acts with sexual purpose or content that violates women’s bodies and/or minds. This would include rape and sexual assault, a term reserved for unwanted sexual contact that does not involve penetration.Sexual victimization also covers sexual coercion, verbal and visual harassment, and (as we explain in Chapter 7) most stalking behavior. Sexual victimization can be attempted, completed, or threatened. Third, we use the concept of acquaintance rape to cover rapes by a perpetrator the victim knows but is neither formally dating nor enmeshed with in an ongoing intimate relationship. The term date rape refers to rapes that occur on a date or by a dating partner.

Beyond Real Rape

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In 1987, Susan Estrich, then a law professor at Harvard University, published Real Rape. Estrich began this volume with a chilling account of a rape she had experienced in 1974, shortly before she entered law school. As she was exiting her automobile in a parking lot, she was abruptly pushed back inside and raped. Her money and car were stolen.When the police arrived, they sized up the situation.Was her account believable? She had no bruises. But her story rang true. She seemed like a “nice girl,” and the perpetrator was a stranger—and a black man at that. They were willing to take her to the police station and have her repeat her story. Later, after a trip to the hospital, she returned to the station to look at mug shots of suspected rapists.Her car was recovered, without tires. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime.

Estrich noted that, in a way, she was a fortunate rape victim. “I am lucky because everyone agrees that I was ‘really’ raped. . . . no one doubts my status as a victim. No one suggests that I was ‘asking for it.’ No one wonders, at least out loud, if it was really my fault” (1987, p. 3). This is because she experienced a “real rape”—a sexual penetration to which she “obviously” did not give her consent. A real rape has certain markers: the perpetrator is a stranger; the act is committed in a public setting; the victim shows signs of resistance or of being overpowered—torn clothes, a bloodied face, bodily bruises.

Ironically, however, Estrich’s book was not about real rape. Rather, she conveyed her victimization as a way of illuminating another kind of victimization, which she termed “simple rape.” (As noted, others would call this acquaintance or date rape.) Victims of these assaults typically are raped in private settings and by people they know. On the crucial issue of their consent to the sexual act, their testimony that they said “no” often is not sufficient. For victims to be believed, a witness must be present or they must suffer sufficient physical harm that their effort to resist the sexual act cannot be challenged. “To use resistance as a substitute for intent,” observed Estrich (1987, p. 96), “unnecessarily and unfairly immunizes those men whose victims are afraid enough, or intimidated enough, or frankly smart enough not to take the risk of resisting physically.”

The point of Estrich’s book was to show that “a ‘simple’ rape is a real rape” (1987, p. 7, emphasis added). Her goal was to change the way in which sexual victimization is understood or “socially constructed.” In this view, a rape is a crime regardless of whether it is perpetrated by a stranger or an acquaintance, occurs in a private or a public setting, or leaves a woman battered or free of bruises.

This is not to say that the issue of consent is unproblematic. Sexual encounters with acquaintances or dating partners may evolve over an evening’s time. Men may misinterpret a woman’s willingness to engage in some sexual acts as an expression of her willingness to have intercourse. Cues meant to communicate a lack of consent might not be expressed clearly or fully understood. Research shows that even women who have been legally raped do not always define their nonconsensual sexual victimization as the crime of rape (see, e.g., Fisher, Daigle, Cullen, & Turner, 2003b; Kahn, Jackson, Kully, Badger, & Halvorsen, 2003).

Nonetheless, this ambiguity on the issue of consent is not a license to ignore that many women, some repeatedly, experience acquaintance or “simple” rapes. As Estrich noted, these victims—and how well they survived a potentially disquieting victimization—matter too. Further, attempts to downplay these nonconsensual victimizations as an “unfortunate misunderstanding” risk nourishing the acceptability of “rape myths.” As Chapleau, Oswald, and Russell (2003, pp. 601–602) explain, “rape myths are stereotypical or false beliefs about the culpability of victims, the innocence of rapists, and the illegitimacy of rape as a serious crime” (see also Payne, Lonsway, & Fitzgerald, 1999). These antisocial beliefs—what criminologists call “techniques of neutralization” (Sykes & Matza, 1957)—give potential perpetrators the justification or permission to engage in forced sex (e.g., “when a woman says ‘no’ she really means ‘yes’”; “she was asking for it”).

It is noteworthy that writing in the mid-1980s, Estrich took notice of one positive development. “For the first time,” she observed, “colleges are recognizing and trying to deal with date rape on their campuses” (1987, p. 7). To Estrich, “this discovery of date rape is surely an important part of the effort to change the way men and women in our society think about nonconsensual sex.”(p. 7). Two decades later, our book is, in a way, a product of this discovery and an attempt to document the extent of the ways in which female college students are sexually victimized.

Sexual Victimization in Context

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Estrich’s Real Rape was not a solitary call for action but part of a larger chorus demanding that female victims be accorded equal protection under the law. Most generally, her book appeared as the civil rights movement was well under way and had expanded its focus beyond racial equality to include gender equality. This campaign argued for the extension of rights to females across social, economic, and political domains—to provide women equal access to higher education, to participation in sports, to employment, and to financial remuneration. Advocates further insisted that the nation’s women be free from the control of men not only in public sectors but also in private sectors such as the home and bedroom.

In this latter regard, special efforts were made to recognize and publicize “intimate violence”—the ways in which women were victimized physically in private settings (Gelles & Straus, 1988). Most of this attention was given to domestic violence and to sexual victimization, especially date or acquaintance rape.Writings in this area tended to be informed by three central themes.

First, an attempt was made to show how violence against women, often disquieting in its ruthlessness and effects, had been hidden behind closed doors, rendering victims invisible (Belknap, 1996). In Domestic Tyranny, Elizabeth Pleck (1987, p. 182) notes that there “was virtually no public discussion of wife beating from the turn of the century until the mid-1970s.” In the Journal of Marriage and the Family, the first article on family violence did not appear until 1969, 3 decades after the forum’s inception (Pleck, 1987). Similar observations were made about sexual victimization (Brownmiller, 1975; Estrich, 1987; Warshaw, 1988). Second, commentators decried the failure of the criminal justice system to treat women as true victims and to protect them from male perpetrators. The promise of equal protection under the law in the United States was unmasked as an empty promise to half the nation’s population. Third, violence against women was portrayed as a fundamental by-product of sex inequality and the sexist beliefs that supported this patriarchal system. Male violence, including rape, was not due to a few pathological “bad apples” but to a “bad barrel” that allowed men to use physical power to maintain control over women and to take what they wanted. Such dominance was so hegemonic that ideology had arisen (such as “rape myths”) that justified women’s coercion. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf (1991, p. 167) expressed this view:

Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events. The boys may even be unaware that what they are doing is wrong; violent sexual imagery may well have raised a generation of young men who can rape women without even knowing it. (emphasis in the original)

Attributing male violence against women to patriarchy politicized these issues. Showing the extent of, and failure to prevent, females’ victimization became feminist causes integral to the women’s movement for equal rights. Many women were inspired not only to write books and articles but also to take to the streets to demand changes. Advances were achieved more quickly in the area of domestic violence, where advocates succeeded in opening shelters for battered women and forcing police departments to arrest male abusers. Sexual victimization, however, also earned attention. Thus, statutes were passed outlawing marital rape (husbands had been legally raping wives with impunity) and the use of past sexual history to discredit rape victims testifying against their perpetrators (rape shield laws). Awareness of date and acquaintance rape also occurred.

This politicization, however, had another consequence. It meant that women’s victimization would not be seen as a neutral, bipartisan matter but as part of a culture war between the political left and right. Efforts on college campuses to “raise consciousness” about acquaintance and date rape, to warn that “every man is a potential rapist,” and to implement prevention programs were portrayed as radical feminism run amok (Roiphe, 1993). The illumination of wife battering was similarly suspected as a disingenuous leftist attempt to attack the traditional nuclear family in which authoritative fathers worked and nurturing mothers raised children. As Pleck (1987, p. 197) notes:

The New Right identified domestic violence legislation with feminism, which in turn they associated with an attack on “motherhood, the family, and Christian values.” They hoped to restore the family as an institution separate from the public world. At the same time, they wanted to win the state over to their own view of morality. This New Right favored federal legislation to outlaw abortion, [to] prohibit teenagers from receiving birth control information, and to reinstate prayer in public schools.

As we will return to fairly soon, the study of sexual victimization, especially acquaintance and date rape, is now always undertaken in a politicized context. Those conducting research risk the criticism that the supposed scientific data they produce are, in reality, a product of their feminist ideology. Because many of those moved to probe the nature and extent of sexual victimization are females if not also feminists, this criticism has a surface appeal. In the end, however, research findings should be assessed based on their scientific merits and not discredited by ad hominem attacks from those harboring alternative political sentiments and, as is often the case, no data of their own.

The Hidden Figure of Rape

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On June 3, 1991, the cover of Time showed a black and white picture of a college coed, allegedly sexually victimized, partially overlaid with the title, in stunning red, “Date Rape.” Inside, the cover story probed how the very concept of rape was being broadened to include this type of sexual victimization (Gibbs, 1991a). Issue...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Discovery of Sexual Victimization
• 2. Beyond the Culture Wars: The Measurement of Sexual Victimization
• 3. The Risk of Rape: Unsafe in the Ivory Tower?
• 4. Beyond Rape: The Pervasiveness of Sexual Victimization
• 5. It Happened Again: Sexual Revictimization
• 6. Victim Secrets: Acknowledging and Reporting Sexual Victimization
• 7. Being Pursued: The Stalking of Female Students
• 8. Creating Safe Havens: Preventing Sexual Victimization
• References
• Index
• About the Authors