From my own personal experience, I’ve always had nothing but good things to say about PSafe. Our amiable relationship began in my first semester here: a friend and I were each drinking a beer as we walked past Hall-Atwater when a PSafe officer confronted us (oh shit!). She said something along the lines of, “Hey, how’re you boys doing tonight? Can I ask if you’re both 21?” to which I think we said, “Uhhh . . . yes?” She just smiled and graciously let our bald-faced lie pass without comment. When our PSafe officer explained that we were violating Middletown’s open-container law, we immediately offered to empty our cans, and she responded by shushing us: “Oh no, no, no. I just want to make sure y’all are gonna have a good night and stay out of trouble! Finish your beer! Just make sure you drink it away from street view.”
I tell this story because it seems hard to believe that a current Wes frosh could have the same experience that I had then. It now seems like Wesleyan’s administration has grown more focused on how our school is externally perceived than on the practical well-being of us students.
Like every other college that receives federal funding, Wesleyan is required to publish a Clery Disclosure of Campus Crime Statistics every year. The most recent version of this report shows that in the past three years, “liquor law disciplinary referrals” (read: getting SJB’d) have risen 148 percent from 186 in 2007 to 461 by 2009. And before you think it, no, it wasn’t just Tour de Franzia spiking the average. In the same timeframe, drug-related disciplinary referrals grew 677 percent with just 13 in 2007 and 101 in 2009.
To see how we stand relative to our fellow academic institutions, I Googled the Clery statistics for Brown, Yale, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Bard, Wellesley, and Trinity. The comparison shows that none of these schools even comes close to replicating Wesleyan’s astounding use of disciplinary referrals—in fact, six schools decreased the number of students who were being brought up on alcohol or drug charges.
What happened? Did PSafe suddenly decide to crack down on drugs and alcohol? Many of us have witnessed the effects of this new policing policy, but I’m not aware of any student who was informed why, when, or if Wesleyan decided to change course three years ago. Why is that?
These kinds of questions are important because a lot of us are currently realizing—if we didn’t already know—how rape poses a more potent and proximate threat to our community than alcohol, larceny, or burglary. (By the way, of the set of schools I looked at, we exceed the mean value of burglary and larceny incidents per student by 672 percent). Unfortunately, sexual assault comprises the most under-reported kind of incident among all the categories covered in the Clery report. Priorities, Wesleyan! The assertion that only five rapes have occurred here in the past three years is ludicrous as well as alarming.
We should read this report as an insight into what our administration perceives as Wesleyan’s problems, instead of interpreting it as actually relevant to the real issues which concern students. Underage drinking and drug use, like rape, have undoubtedly existed at our school for a long time. The difference is that the first two seemed, for some reason, important enough to merit a crackdown, when what we really need is a crackdown on rapists.
But let’s not delude ourselves into holding the administration accountable for this sorry state. We students might not have participated in the decision to escalate disciplinary measures for underage drinking and pot smoking. What we can presently decide, however, is to commit ourselves to ending rape at Wesleyan. The startling statistics presented here should serve as a call for all of us to reject the sexual violence that we seem to have accepted as the status quo—unreported, ignored, and festering. We can begin to bring this issue to light by making a concerted and communal effort to document rape when it happens. Because, if we don’t encourage victims to report sexual assault, then we’ve already conceded any hope of keeping our community free from predators.
Scarborough is a member of the class of 2011.
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