Early last Sunday morning, my housemate and two other friends were assaulted on Williams Street near our Lorise. The attacks, which have now become widely known throughout the Wesleyan community, left my friends with bumps, bruises, in one case a chipped tooth, and were a frightening reminder to all of us of the limitations of our safety. To Wesleyan’s credit, the administration’s response has been swift and decisive – a coordinated effort between Public Safety and the Middletown police, described in one of numerous all-campus emails updating us and offering safety recommendations soon after the incident, has within two days of the assault brought a visibly increased security presence to the Lorise area. What I fail to comprehend is why there has never been a comparable response to any of the cases of rape that have occurred in the nearly three years that I have been at Wesleyan.
In the various cases of rape that have been reported at Wesleyan, including one that took place in my dormitory last year and another that occurred this month, the administration has never reacted with the level of substantive, sweeping changes that it has enacted after the assaults. After the controversial incident in my dorm last year, in which the accused was found guilty of rape by the Student Judicial Board, the administration response consisted of a dorm-wide meeting held by the Dean of the College, and a one-year suspension of the person found guilty after which they were invited to return to Wesleyan. The rape reported on the weekend of April 10 this month, despite Public Safety’s impressive work in identifying the culprit, also did not elicit a campus-wide, policy level response. In fact, the administration proposed cuts to the campus escort service directly after the rape was reported on the previous weekend.
It should not be necessary to remind this administration of the stunningly different magnitudes of the crimes in question. My friends who were assaulted are shaken but they are fine. They have not suffered a trauma that is beyond my ability to imagine, and they will not be dealing with ongoing emotional consequences that will remain with them throughout their lives. Nor have I, as a man, felt the sort of personal intimidation that Kendra Ing and Una Osato describe in terms more powerful than I am capable of in Wespeaks last week, that afflicts large parts of the female community at Wesleyan in the aftermath of women being raped.
While the Administration is at work rethinking their security policies, it is time for them to get serious about rape. There are a variety of options available if they chose to take this issue on: not only improved lighting and an immediate retraction of proposed cuts in the campus escort service, but real educational outreach that is mindful of the fact that, according the U.S. Department of Justice, 68 percent of rapes are committed by acquaintances of the victim. Rape prevention education ought to be given in a mandatory setting more frequent than a single easily skipped workshop before the beginning of freshman year. There should not be one more rape that occurs at Wesleyan, and the Administration has a fundamental responsibility towards ensuring that this is the case.
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