It’s mid-August now; everyone is preparing for the big return to school. Whether it be buying fresh colored pencils and ticking items off a third-grade school supplies list or buying a laundry basket and preparing to move college seniors into their apartments, parents all over the world are getting ready to send their sons and daughters back to school. I have no personal parenting experience, but I can guess that parents sending their children off to college think mostly about the absence of their child in their immediate daily lives. From the other perspective, college students are usually DYING to get back to school; a slight contrast from the dread that grammar and high school level students feel when returning. The return to college means not only the start of another academic year, but the start of endless socialization opportunities and wild, independent, adventures.
And as for me? I’m not so sure how I feel about returning to college in a few short weeks.
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Don’t get me wrong – I am a social butterfly. I maintain a solid GPA by working very hard in school, but balance out by blowing off lots of steam on the weekends, and going out to explore every and any social spot in Baltimore where my friends and I might have a good time. Up until very recently, all I could think about when I was falling asleep at night was throwing an apartment-warming party with my best friends once we all moved into our new homes in September. Everyone I know has been planning our future escapades since we bid each other farewell in May.
But why, then, am I hesitant about running back to this life? Because there is a darker side to the college environment. I’m sure that on move-in day, my mother and my five roommates’ respective parents will not be thinking about how the six girls moving into apartment 404 each have a 1 in 5 chance of being sexually violated on our own campus this year. While we’re catching up with acquaintances at parties, we’re not thinking about how 90% of sexually assaulted women on college campuses know their offenders. As we’re hanging up posters on our walls and clothes in our closets, the thought that for every 1000 women on a college campus an estimated 35 will be assaulted every year, amounting to 560 assaults over four years on a campus of 4000 undergraduates, never crosses our minds.
The threat of sexual assault on a college campus is abhorrently, disgustingly real. And as we’ve seen this summer, not all rapists receive proper justice. College campuses have started down a road to abolishing a rape culture – what would’ve been called a girl being ‘taken advantage of’ or a ‘drunken mistake’ we’re now correctly identifying as ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ – the outcomes of two major and recent rape cases, the Brock Turner (Stanford) case and the Austin Wilkerson (CU Boulder) case, showed collegiate women across the country that the only people who are safe from repercussions in sexual assault cases are the offenders themselves. I go to one of the best lacrosse schools in the country, and I understand the idea that collegiate athletes deserve some privileges around campus. They basically have a full-time job in playing a sport, they bring in money and pride for the school, and they totally deserve the best times to pick classes and housing. But the idea that the violation of another human being’s body, the forced and traumatic intimacy of any kind of sexual assault, is excusable under any circumstances is beyond my understanding.
I was raised in a home where I was taught at an early age about how to responsibly take care of my mind and my body, and what was okay and not okay for other people to do to my mind and my body. I’ve always been smart in social situations; my friends use the buddy system, we have the Find My Friends app, and most of all, we really, really care about each other’s safeties. But even that’s not enough. After reading the open letter that Brock Turner’s victim wrote, I realized that letting my guard down for even one second at a party could land me in a similar situation. We live in a world where my peers need to keep an eye out for not only ourselves, but other women around us, at all times. It’s ceaseless, and tiring, and terrifying. The only way we can even step out the front door on a Friday night is by saying, ‘Yeah, but that won’t happen to me.’ Problem is, it can, and it might. So we keep our guards up at all times. You could go up to any girl my age and I guarantee she has at least four anecdotes of ‘creepy’ guys she’s met. It’s heartbreaking that we have to consider ourselves lucky to have not been assaulted by these men, but that’s where we are, and that’s where we’ll stay unless we do some major reconstruction on the way each and every individual mentally approaches the idea of collegiate sexual assault.
So forgive me if I’m a bit nervous about stepping back onto my college campus, the place that should be my safe haven and sanctuary.
If you or someone you know has experienced a sexual assault, please consider telling a trusted friend or family member, or using these resources:
1-800-656-4673 (National Sexual Assault Hotline, open 24/7)
http://www.nsvrc.org/ (National Sexual Violence Resource Center)
