Date Rape Revisited

As we close out February, and end Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, here is a look back at a study done 25 years ago that pulled back the curtain on a little known issue called date rape on college campuses. Certainly, our awareness of date rape has enlightening to read and begs the question, how far have we come? Can we do better and if so, how?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Support the only organization in America with a mission and plan to stop ALL of abuse.  Become a member of the Stop Abuse Campaign.  It’s quick, easy and it’s the right thing to do. Take The Pledge to become an AbuseStopper!  Get  involved and learn how to make an effort to make a difference, because sooner or later, abuse touches us all.

Date Rape Revisited

By Ellen Sweet | February 23, 2012

Mary Koss, a University of Arizona regents professor, conducted groundbreaking research on campus date-rape.

Twenty-five years after an historic campus study, why are colleges still struggling to deal with the problem?

In 1982, Ms. Magazine and an academic researcher embarked on a groundbreaking study of a little-known subject: date rape on college campuses.  At that time, most people still thought of rape, on campus or off, as committed by someone who was a stranger to the victim. The three-year study, funded by the federal government, surveyed more than 7,000 students at 35 schools and blew the top off accepted wisdom.

I was the coordinator of the Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault, and Mary P. Koss (pictured above), a nationally known research psychologist, directed the field study and analysis of data.  The early findings first appeared in my article in the October 1985 issue of Ms. entitled “Date Rape:  The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Deny It.”  Among them, 1 in 4 college women were victims of rape or attempted rape, and only 1 in 4 women whose sexual assault met the legal definition identified their experience as rape. (A full report on the study was first published in 1988 by Harper and Row under the title I Never Called It Rape.)

The article highlighted some of the colleges that were breaking ground with innovative programs to address the problem.  At Cornell University, for example, a professor helped organize an Acquaintance Rape Task Force; Ohio State University, where Mary Koss was teaching at the time, was nationally known for its rape awareness and prevention programs; and students at Swarthmore College produced a video on acquaintance rape (the other term for date rape).  In subsequent years, especially at schools that had recently gone co-ed, students of both sexes began to organize for change, calling for better safety measures and more transparency in the complaint process.  My Ms. article was assigned reading in numerous sociology, psychology, health, and women’s studies courses.

Twenty-five years later, however, recent news stories about sexual harassment and assault on campus led me to wonder why colleges haven’t been able to effectively address the problem.  At Yale University, for example, which had participated in the original Ms. study, star quarterback Patrick Witt was alleged to have sexually assaulted a woman student, which may have led to his forfeit of a Rhodes scholarship.

Perhaps more important was another story, reported at about the same time, that Yale was in the process of overhauling its sexual harassment policies because a fraternity’s members and pledges had been more than sophomorically aggressive toward women on campus, shouting insults that bordered on threats.  (The fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, happens to have been Witt’s fraternity.)  The school responded with a report about the number of complaints students had filed in the past six months and how they were handled.

Bully for Yale, but why act so belatedly?  Women have been undergraduates at Yale since 1969. I called Mary Koss, who has continued to do award-winning research on violence against women, and Wendy J. Murphy, a lawyer who has filed complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to force changes in college’s sexual harassment and assault policies.  The psychologist and the lawyer agreed on many things but, not surprisingly, had different recommendations for how to solve the problem.

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