Sexual Assault: Improve Prevention, not Reaction

Given Joanna Bourain ’12’s recent Wespeak “Wesleyan’s Great, Unless You Get Raped,” we feel that it is a good time to share our thoughts on how sexual assault is discussed on campus. Bourain’s issues with the administration’s resources for survivors of sexual assault are clearly important to consider, as Dr. Davis Smith, the medical director of Davison Health Center, points out in his Wespeak in this issue of The Argus. What we feel is even more crucial, however, is the fact that most of the student body does not possess a clear definition of sexual assault.

The reason most students cannot give a clear definition of sexual assault is because the administration has not established strict guidelines for what sexual assault actually is. The administration has depended on events like Unspeakable Acts to clarify incoming freshmen’s perceptions, but these events present freshmen with a nebulous definition of sexual assault, creating more confusion than clarity. For those students do not even attend these performances, they start their Wesleyan careers with little exposure to the issues of sexual assault.

Instead of optional events that merely involve passive observation, the administration should establish mandatory workshops that clearly define what assault means, define sexual complicity, and present the various resources available to survivors. The University should establish a system that would scan student IDs when they attended the workshop, so that all students are forced to go. Whether or not a student has participated in the formation of a universal definition of sexual assault should be just as important as attending a community standards workshop for wood frame houses, which is mandatory for every senior housing group (and enforced by scanning students’ WesIDs).

Many, if not all, RAs discuss these topics with their residents, but these meetings, and the orientation events that compliment them, are not enough. As things currently stand, there is no common agreement on what sexual assault is, and so they have difficulty discussing these topics, preventing them from happening, and responding to them when they do happen. In fact, it is common for students to say that they were unaware of what sexual assault was until one of their friends became a survivor.

It is important to remember that students come from a variety of different cultures, and so universal standards are crucial to bridging the differences among these cultures and facilitating greater awareness. Just as people need to use a common language in order to express complex ideas, so too must the concepts involved with sexual assault be explicitly defined and understood so that we can work towards more effectively preventing sexual assault on this campus.