Rather than decreasing, rape appears only to be increasing as a global crisis. In India, gang rapes and the killings of girls continued to make headlines last week, while the inauguration of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo was marred by numerous violent sexual assaults that outraged the nation. But even as these events receive coverage and criticism in American media, what's going on at home – and the way American society is currently responding to rape and rape culture – should be just as disturbing.
Too often, as evidenced by Glenn Beck’s recent mockery of rape victims in a segment in May, women are given aren't given a voice to tell their stories, while at the same time so much focus remains on the victims rather than the perpetrators.
Consider this example:
It was one of the longest night of her life. N. had gotten drunk on campus at one of the weekend fraternity parties she regularly enjoyed at one of America's top East Coast schools. While intoxicated, she was still very much aware of her surroundings, and it was the first time she was raped.
“I was upstairs and had gotten drunk,” N., a graphic designer living in New York City, told Occupy.com, withholding her name for privacy reasons.
“I was in the bed, drunk but not blacking out. I remember one boy coming upstairs and taking off my clothes, and even as I said no, [he] forcibly had sex with me,” she recalled. But it did not end there.
“I guess what happened is that he went down and told his friends, his frat brothers, that I was upstairs. At least two more boys came in and had sex with me. I didn’t want any of that and when I went to the school, they told me I shouldn’t have been drinking in excess and that I should be more aware of what I do on the weekends and when I drink. It was humiliating,” she said.
N., of course, is not alone, but one of the millions of women in the U.S. who have been raped. She said she believes the problem lies in the basic cultural makeup of American society and the belief that women are the ones at fault – guilty until found innocent. “I have spoken to so many other women my age and we all have experienced rape or sexual assault. This is the American way of life and women are nothing more than chattel to be played around with,” she added.
According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 80 percent of rapes in the country are perpetrated against women under 30, with the majority of reports occurring on university and college campuses. Too often women are blamed for their dress, drinking or flirting, and their survival of the sexual trauma is put aside.
“Were you wearing the appropriate clothes?" and "Were you flirting with that person inappropriately?” are a couple of the questions often asked by police, administrators and friends of victims following a rape. Zerlina Maxwell, writing recently on her own experience of rape, highlights the problem inherent in American culture:
“These questions about my choices the night of my assault — as opposed to the choices made by my rapist — were in some ways as painful as the violent act itself. I had stumbled upon rape culture: a culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults.”
Trauma and Humiliation
Salma, a Muslim-American student who is an English major at one of California's public universities, says she has been raped twice while attending school. The first time was by her boyfriend, “who forced himself on me one night when I was not in the mood. It was violent and I didn’t want to have sex,” she said.
She informed the school’s security and was questioned for two hours about the incident. “It was the worst day of my life, having to answer all sorts of questions about my sexual activity,” Salma said. “The university officials asked me about my boyfriends, if I had multiple partners. Then they asked me what I wore to parties, and this was part of their defense. Nothing happened to my boyfriend, who I broke up with after that.”
A year later, while attending a fraternity party on campus, Salma had one drink and began to get dizzy. She went to lie down in a bedroom to “cool off” but when awoke she was completely naked, and “I could see that at least one person had had sex with me while I was blacked out," she said.
The school did not follow up her case. And when contacted by Occupy.com, administrators did not respond to questions about the school's handling of rape cases on campus.
Crisis In the Universities
This fact alone merits deep investigation – and in once case, at least, it appears to finally be getting it. The inaction by universities in addressing campus rapes came to national attention earlier this year when past and present female students at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against the school alleging its failure to act on behalf of female victims of sexual assault.
The school is currently under audit from legislators over its failure to fully report sexual assault incidents. As part of Title IX, the country's anti-discrimination law, schools receiving federal funding are "required to impartially investigate allegations of sexual assault." But the students say the university has not done so and claim it is a systemic problem facing the female student body.
The suit has provoked an outpouring of discussion and sparked demonstrations across the country, where female students have taken to holding up placards calling for an end to sexual violence on campuses.
Janet Gilmore, director of U.C. Berkeley's communications office of public affairs, said in a phone conversation in February, "Clearly, these students have gone through a horrific ordeal and our hearts go out to them," but she failed to deliver any direct response from the university to tackle the epidemic. Many commentators claim the prevailing silence at universities helps to hide the horrors of sexual violence.
Rapes on American campuses is nothing new. A study by the Center for Disease Control in 2009 reported that 19 percent of undergraduate women had experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering school. Fraternity culture continues to take heat for the role it plays in minimizing women’s rights as human beings, portraying of them as property for men to do with as they please.
In a widely publicized case, Erin Gloria Ryan highlighted leaked emails from a fraternity where boys talked about “getting even” with “bitches” through non-consensual sexual acts.
“The frat bros also consistently use the term ‘plowing’ as a distorted synonym for sex, implying that intercourse with a woman can only be done aggressively and domineeringly,” she said.
Now that more victims like N. and Salma are beginning to speak up across the country, sexual violence is an issue that is forcing its way into the national conversation. But the question remains whether the country will choose, or find itself able, to look deeply at the problem and focus on solutions – or whether U.S. culture, like much of the rest of the world, will continue to blame women for the criminal violations of others.
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