Wesleyan’s students are served better than they know in the serious matters of sexual assault and consequent trauma.

Davison Health Center (DHC) employs a female physician who has previous training experience with sexual assault evidence collection. All DHC medical providers have experience with sexual health testing and counseling and are knowledgeable about referral resources on and off campus. DHC administrators met last semester with two Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE) from Middlesex Hospital to learn about the procedures and services offered through the Emergency Department. The SANE nurses will provide staff development for clinicians during the academic year. During the academic year, follow-up medical care is available at DHC for students treated in the Emergency Department. Sexual health testing and prescription medications are made available without cost to students who are sexually assaulted.

Throughout my career, I have designed or helped to design programmatic responses to sexual assault on college campuses. As long ago as the 1970s, I served as psychiatric consultant to the Yale-New Haven Rape Counseling Team. In the 1980s, I was training personnel in the Connecticut State’s Attorney’s office and the State Police how to respond to the victims of sexual assault. I also coordinate OBHS’s responses to this problem.

Sexual assault and the trauma it inflicts are complicated phenomena. Complaints of sexual assault range from out-and—out forcible rape to far more ambiguous incidents that entail subtle, but critically important, questions of consent, concomitant substance abuse, feelings of shame and often terrible emotional hurt. OBHS believes that sexual assault and trauma, being such wide-spectrum phenomena, are best addressed by therapists who have the broadest training and experience in human psychology. This is one of the reasons OBHS has employed doctoral-level therapists. The education and experience of OBHS’s therapists in matters of sexual assault is constant and ongoing. We believe the Wesleyan student community is well served in this area by our office. (Certainly, if any student victim of sexual assault feels s/he has had a poor experience with one of our professionals, we want to know about it!)

All this is not to say that the communication to the student body of Wesleyan’s resources in this area is maximal. A well-designed sexual assault services website can only improve this. And, of course, we are always open to other suggestions.