So I just finished grading a set of 74 undergraduate essays. The assigned topic: abortion. And indeed, I read a lot of moving stories about pregnancy scares, boyfriends who saw their girlfriends through an abortion, friends who got pregnant at 16.
What I didn’t expect: a flurry of even tougher stories about rape. Out of those 74 papers, four volunteered heartrending stories of how their author had been raped. Another young woman had told of her rape in discussion last week. That makes 5 out of 74, or 6.8%.
No, this doesn’t rise to the the much-ballyhooed, much-maligned “one in four” statistic from Mary Koss’ research in the early 1990s. No, my sample size isn’t big enough to draw any broad, statistically significant conclusions.
However. These were all forcible rapes (mostly by acquaintances). They are what even Whoopie Goldberg would call “rape-rapes.” If you asked about lesser sex crimes, the overall number of sexual assaults would likely be much higher. (Koss also counted attempted assaults when she measured the prevalence of sexual assault among college women.)
When I hit the last of these stories, I burst into tears of anger and grief.
Four of the five women were 15 or younger when they happened. The other two were 18 or younger. Most of the students in this class are early in their college careers. Their high schools weren’t safe, but we can’t claim they’re any safer here at the university.
Here’s what really kicked me in the gut: These are only the stories that emerged when a completely different question was posed! The assignment had nothing to do with rape, intrinsically. But for some of these girls, rape is now inextricably linked to how they view their risk of pregnancy. A couple of them blame themselves for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or failing to report promptly. How can they arrive at a place where sexuality isn’t forever entwined with danger? (Some of them have, remarkably, and I was privileged to hear their stories. Of course, I’m obligated to protect their privacy, so those stories stop with me.)
And how many more stories were left untold? How many other stories would surface, if a different question were asked?
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Thought provoking, moving and well written. As ever with your posts, Sungold.
Thanks, Mark. I’m really glad to hear from you! I was starting to get concerned, since you hadn’t posted on your own blog for weeks. Hope all’s well with you.
I am pleased to say that no news is good news. I’ll have to either send you an email and/or update the blog soonish to explain…
Oh, good! I’ll look for an update.
Yeah. One of the more brutal rape stories I ever encountered also came to me via a college paper. I don’t think the author had any intention of sharing the story with anyone but me, and one reason she wrote about it was because she knew that her family would blame her for the rape if they ever found out.
It’s a little odd to get an assignment that’s clearly been used for therapeutic purposes, but sometimes that’s the *only* way a survivor can talk about it. You’re an authority figure, but a sympathetic one, and you’re not part of her circle of family and friends.
One of my students wrote about the shame she faced in her whole community, especially after she subsequently chose abortion for the pregnancy that ensued. To my mind, that is just plain criminal.
It must be hard to read all of this especially after hearing about the young woman who was raped on campus just a few days ago by two men. I used to walk miles to my home from campus on the weekends at 1 or 2 in the morning, by myself, and after having spent some time at the bars. It is tragic to think that people (myself included) might blame me if a rape were to occur because I “should have known better.” Do men have fears of walking alone late at night?
Some men do have fears of walking alone at night, but those who admit it are usually originally from tough neighborhoods. Most don’t feel spooked here in Athens.
That incident earlier this week was just horrifying. For non-locals: A young woman was pulled into a car in a dark but populous area on the edge of campus, and raped by two men. Like I said, horrifying. One of my colleagues feels the sexual assault problem is worse here on this campus than elsewhere. I’m skeptical. Granted, the party culture might play a role in worsening the problem. I think it’s more likely, though, that she’s just hearing about it due to what she’s teaching (intro to women’s and gender studies).
These were all forcible rapes (mostly by acquaintances). They are what even Whoopie Goldberg would call “rape-rapes.”
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I don’t know what Whoopi considers a “rape-rape” since she didn’t consider the Polanski rape to be “rape-rape.” It doesn’t get much more “rape” than that case (drugging an underage girl and forcing anal sex on her while she repeatedly says “No”).
Um, yeah. Point granted. I guess it’s only “rape-rape” when a guy jumps out of the bushes. At least within Whoopie’s Hollywood bubble world.
This post brings up two very different (but related?) thoughts for me.
First, in the vein of monstrous self-pity or perhaps envy, is that as an undergraduate I had a story like that, but there is no way I ever would have written it for a class. In fact, there is no way I would ever have taken a class where a story like that could have, even tangentially, come up. When I was in my late teens, I thought I knew so much more than I do now, and I would have gone as far as to dismiss a class where somebody’s rape story could be passed of as academic work as inherently unworthy and just so much navel gazing. I am a bit more open-minded these days, but I maintain a healthy level of skepticism about conflating personal stories with academic work, unless the assignment calls for memoir or personal narrative. How do you move students beyond the inevitable adolescent focus on “me as the most interesting person in the universe” to something more disciplined, with broader implications?
Second, I know a woman who is a professor. She’s one of the tough profs at her university who makes students read and then write critically about what they have read. She complains about a constant stream of students telling her stories about various serious traumas. She doesn’t think sheca help her students with these issues and also doesn’t want to take on that role. She wants some place to refer them to besides her campus mental health service, which she views as being staffed by idiots. As I read your post, I could picture her saying that she was happy to work with students on academic issues, but this isn’t her job. Then she shrugged, “Maybe it’s an American thing? But they need to learn because they can’t take that into the workplace.”. Is it an American thing? You’ve been to German universities. While I haven’t been to one lately, I have a hard time believing that things have changed so much that a professor in a German university would be hearing confessions.
Your post raises a question for me about the role of professor and classes in the university. I think some areas of study run a risk of becoming a type of group therapy. Women’s studies, queer studies, and African American studies all seem to risk becoming about “me, me, me” as people in their late teens grapple with certain facets of identity. Certain other areas of study seem less prone to this risk like engineering, accounting, hard sciences. Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast distinction. Astronomy can lead you to Drake’s equation about estimating the probability of intelligent life on other planets (all those assumptions that it would, of necessity, look like us — so no plants too lose to a sun where amino acids would be broken down by solar radiation — at least I think that’s how it goes). But if we’re talking about courses in differential equations or statistics or thermodynamics or tax accounting, there’s not much self-discovery or group therapy to it. Does that make these classes somehow more academic or more worthwhile? I am interested in your thoughts.
Uff da. That’s a lot of questions at once. To take the last part first: I don’t think group therapy is an appropriate activity for the classroom. Self-discovery, though, is a whole ‘nother matter. As a college freshman, I read St. Augustine the first week of my history class – and it put me on a path away from orthodox Christianity. I think students *should* be reflecting on whether ideas speak to them – whether it’s Marxism or monetarism, feminism or anti-racism, or whatever. I think a wide-ranging liberal education ought to include classes that have the potential to shake up (or reconfirm) a student’s worldview, along with vector calculus and organic chem.
The way you avoid letting women’s studies (or similar fields) become “all about me” is by ensuring that the material is intersectional – that it includes texts by writers who are differently positioned than the readers. So sure, my mostly white, female students might read something by Jessica Valenti and relate to it from their own lives. But they’ll also read Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks and Suzanne Pharr and a host of other people who can shake them out of comfortable self-absorption. (That said, self-absorption can also be pretty uncomfortable when your life includes significant trauma.)
This particular class is academically quite rigorous. Its title is “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality,” and most of the readings are pretty dense and difficult. They can’t easily relate to any of the readings. Through discussions, the students are challenged to see how the ideas might shake up their own religious and moral convictions. But the readings and lectures are liable to send unserious students running for cover. Leviticus, anyone?
This particular assignment asked them to wrestle with the ideas in a book by an ex-Catholic priest, Daniel Maguire, on various religions’ views toward contraception and abortion. As part of that, they were asked to explain their own moral reasoning in the event that they – or a close loved one/partner – were faced with an unwanted pregnancy. They had some license to tell personal stories within this framework. I let them know that they would be graded on the clarity of their moral reasoning and their written expression – NOT on their experiences or their basic stance toward abortion. So it wasn’t a free-for-all, and they had clear criteria for a successful paper.
The rape stories just burst out because they saw an opportunity. I’ve even seen rape story appear on an end-of-quarter course evaluation. (Her take: people just need to suck it up. I obviously hadn’t given her any tools for making sense of her experience, even politically.) People need a place to tell these stories and there are very few opportunities.
I am really sorry that you’ve got one of those stories, too. I hope you’ve got some degree of peace about it. If you’ve still got the urge to write about it, maybe you could jot it down just for yourself.
I do agree with your professor friend that instructors are not therapists and we shouldn’t be. We can and should refer our students to campus counselors, but my experience, too, is that students come back with very mixed reviews. Occasionally they are assigned to grad students in training who appear to have no clue. Or they just don’t connect to the person to whom they’re assigned.
I think instructors do have a role to play as concerned adults – as mentors – and just as human beings who care. That doesn’t mean we should try to “therapize” our students, but it’s not inappropriate to serve as a sounding board. If we can do that effectively, we probably will have better luck in helping them find more qualified professional help. I’ve actually got a half-written post on this, which maybe I should finish someday!
And no, German universities aren’t such likely places for confessions. But my German-born husband gets a few of these stories too, now that he’s in the U.S. He deals with them pretty well. His thinking is similar to mine: our job is to educate whole human beings, not Fachidioten (specialized idiots), and so that sometimes means extending compassion and a listening ear when a student is struggling with personal problems.
OW! That hurts. Not because you said it, but because it’s so true. Female people learn from such a young age that our sexuality 1> is the most important thing about us, and 2> that it belongs to men.
One thing that depresses the hell out of me is that I feel like we’re backsliding as a culture on your point #1. I don’t feel like the girls I hung out with when I was 15 or 20 felt that way (and by no means did most of them call themselves “feminists”). Today, girls see sexualized images of girls and women so pervasively, and from such a young age, that it seems almost impossible for girls to escape that mandate to be “hott.”