Trauma into Trojan Horse: College Date Rape and Political Agendas

by Schraff

Trauma into Trojan Horse: The Political Agendas Behind the College Date Rape Issue

The psychological fallout of date rape is very real, especially in a residential college setting. Late adolescence is a crucial time of human sociological development. It is during this time that individuals solidify their attitudes towards the outside world and their methods of interacting with it. Traumas experienced at this age will have an impact on attitudes for the rest of the student’s life. Once the problem of widespread nonconsensual sex was recognized, the best solution would have been to have an open, honest dialogue across college campuses. Before this could happen, however, the issue was polarized and politicized by national groups with agendas. Rather than bring positive results, the politicization of date rape has led to a trivialization of young women’s experiences.

The modern concept of date rape differs dramatically from the traditional idea of rape. Date rape does not happen in dark alleys. It happens in bedrooms. Date rape isn’t committed by twisted sexual deviants. It’s committed by average, everyday guys. These men don’t go out with the purpose of anonymously taking advantage of someone, either. The attackers, more often than not, know the person they’re taking advantage of. Date rape, also known as “acquaintance rape,” is the act of having sex without the other party’s explicit consent. There are many reasons why this consent would not be given, but one reason is dramatically more common than the others: the party in question may be too altered by substances like alcohol.

There is little data about whether the majority of date rape takes place in a residential college setting, but the college date rape scenario has certainly gotten the most press. Middle and upper middle class parents don’t pay thousands of dollars to send their daughters into an unsafe environment, after all. One of the most jarring statistics about college-age date rape has been verified by FBI records: one in four women will have been raped or have rape attempted upon them by the age of twenty-five. It is no coincidence that twenty-five is the upper age boundary for college students.

One in four seems like a massive exaggeration, and it would be if the only type of rape in question was violent, random misogynist attacks. The only way this number could have been so inflated is by the relatively recent inclusion of date rape under the larger category of “rape.” I am not suggesting that the reality behind college date rape is a myth. The numbers are there: unfortunate sexual experiences do happen in college, more often than parents would like. It’s a real problem that has yet to be resolved. However, it is an entirely different problem than that of rape. What happens to drunk college students is not the same experience that female prisoners of war had in Sarajevo. The idea of calling any unfortunate sexual experience rape is a fairly new idea. This paradigm shift came with the flood of other paradigm shifts in the seventies.

Before the mid-seventies, the concept of date rape did not exist. Rape was a violent crime committed against individuals by individuals. The 1970s were a very indulgent time in America, and the feminist movement did not pass through the decade unaltered. In 1975, Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will, which served as a turning point in the politicization of the rape experience. Brownmiller writes that rape is a symptom of patriarchy, not an individual crime:

[i]Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function...it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.[/i] [p. 14]

To the modern critic, this comes off as a deeply irrational and paranoid argument. The idea of a gender-wide conspiracy is absurd. Yet this idea of oversimplified boys-versus-girls politics is indicative of the difference between first wave and second wave feminism. The first goal of the feminist movement was equality between genders. The next wave of radical feminists weren’t satisfied with this. Rather than find common ground and work with men for a mutually satisfactory future, the new radicals were separatist in nature. Communicating with “the enemy” was not an option.

In short, date rape is an idea coined by the second wave feminist movement, and they have taken it upon themselves to plant this idea into American culture. Why it is to their advantage to have a generation of women grow up distrustful of men can be explained in one word: politics. Politics is a question of marketing: the more people believe in an idea, the more true the idea is to a culture. In order to maintain power, the feminist movement must have as many believers as possible. To do this, the idea they are trying to present as truth must be as oversimplified and pleasant to grasp as possible. One of the most pleasant realities for someone to grab on to is the idea that nothing is your fault. That is essentially second wave feminism’s message. It’s not your (or your college-attending daughter’s) fault that a bad experience occurred: 100% of the blame must be laid directly on men. The feminist movement is far from the only philosophy that has been reduced to politics, but they are a textbook example of how realities are filtered and manipulated to serve agendas.

This attitude has many critics; many of them are women. The reaction by feminist researchers is that the data is on their side. Their position is that numbers don’t lie, and a negative cannot be proven. Rape is a crime against women perpetrated by men, that that includes date rape. Period. This admittedly draconian attitude has resulted in a reaction against reactionaries. Men are starting to react quite negatively, assuming that all women are “liars” because they remember sexual experiences much more negatively than their male counterparts. Courts are slow to disbelieve women’s claims for fear of creating a political frenzy, and many men believe they legal system is biased against them because it’s “safer” that way. Hype over date rape has exploded to the point that it’s practically a joke. Since second wave feminists have made little distinction between date rape and its more violent, anonymous counterpart, all rape is considered by quite a few men (and some women) to just be females whining about bad decisions they’ve made. This hazardous cultural backlash is the direct result of overaggressive marketing by the feminist movement, an irony that I’m sure is not unnoticed by them.

The thing that both political viewpoints seem to have missed is the most vital fact. Victims of college date rape are mostly women, but they have a more solid unifying factor. They are quite nearly all late adolescents. The psychological state of late adolescents is drastically different from the psychological state of adults. Many college students are away from home for the first time. Being out from underneath their parent’s wing gives the student significantly more freedom than they are used to, or know how to handle.

The idea of having more freedom than one has the maturity to handle ties in with the prevalence of alcohol abuse among this age bracket. Alcohol abuse on college campuses is well documented. In a community study published by the Journal for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32.4% of the 386 students surveyed were at serious risk for developing alcoholism. Overindulgence in alcohol results in impaired decision-making capabilities, which means adolescents may do things—or be coerced into doing things—they wouldn’t do otherwise. Overindulgence in alcohol is caused by lack of experience about one’s personal limits. While overindulgence in alcohol may see to make socializing easier, it also hampers the ability to understand and be understood. The cause of date rape is lack of communication and a lack of self-knowledge. Both these traits are more prevalent in communities of youth than older social circles.

It is distressing distressed that most of the sources regarding the subject of college date rape were at least seven years old. In an effort to have at least one current source, a nine question survey was created regarding attitudes towards rape. I posted this survey on April 11, 2004 to http://www.totse.com, a popular online message board for mid-to-late adolescents. The sixteen replies I received were quite telling. The fallout of rape-crisis feminism was apparent in a fair amount of the responses. One subject said that the only way men could avoid getting accused of rape was “to be castrated, because women are insidious.” Some results were surprising, however. A sparse seven percent felt that it was the man’s direct responsibility to prevent rape from happening. Twenty-seven percent thought it was the woman’s responsibility. An astonishing fifty-four percent thought it was the community’s responsibility.

This, I believe, may be the rational, common sense solution to a problem. When asked what they would suggest to their peers to prevent them from getting raped, the one of the most common answers was, “make sure your friends stop you from doing something you’ll regret.” Youth may not always have the experience to make good decisions, but in a residential college environment, they have a community of peers who, ideally, do not want to see individuals get hurt.

At the heart of the matter, nonconsensual sex on residential college campuses needs to be culturally reframed from a women’s issue to a youth issue. At that point, it will no longer be just a “woman’s problem,” but something that everyone can work on to resolve. Rather than dividing the community into boys against girls, the fight would instead be everyone against preventable suffering. Rather than being an agenda, it will be the road to progress.

Bibliography:

Frost, Abbie K.; Giaconia, Rose M.; Lefkowitz, Eva S.; Pakiz, Bilge; Reinherz, Helen Z. (March 1993). Prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a community population of older adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32 (2), pp369-378:

DeKeseredy, Walter S. (wntr 1996). The Canadian national survey on woman abuse in university/college dating relationships: biofeminist panic transmission or critical inquiry? Canadian Journal of Criminology, 38 (1), pp81-104

Young, Cathy. (Jan 17, 1994). Youthful voice roils rape-crisis debate. Insight on the News, 10 (3), pp18-21

Wiener. Jon. (Jan 20, 1992). 'Rape by innuendo' at Swarthmore. The Nation, 254 (2) pp44-50