Threats of violence and rape have been made toward fifteen Dartmouth student activists who protested about unreported rapes (as well as homophobia and racism) at a Dartmouth event for prospective students over the weekend. Specifically, fifteen current students entered a room where 500 prospective students were being wined and dined by Dartmouth, whereupon they shouted “Dartmouth has a problem!” What was that problem? Read on:
As the protesters walked around the prospective students sitting crossed- legged on floor, they yelled, “Three years, 15 reported sexual assaults. But 95 percent go unreported. Only three rapists expelled in 10 years. Dartmouth has a problem!”
The chant went on to allege incidents on campus of homophobic, sexist graffiti and a verbal racist attacks that have occurred over the past couple years. One student carried a sign that read, “I was called fag in my freshman dorm.”
Yes, those activists disrupted an official Dartmouth event to tell a story about one aspect of life at Dartmouth that Dartmouth probably was not going to tell its incoming class of freshman (not that many other colleges or universities reveal the often sordid side of campus life when trying to entice prospective students to attend their institution of higher learning – it’s simply not a topic fit for polite conversation don’t you know). Still what poor manners those activist “scum” displayed. How uncivilized. How boorish old, man.
Yet, the response to the protesters has created, shall we say, a bit of a sticky wicket for good old Dartmouth. You see, a number of “brave” anonymous posters to Facebook and an online forum, “Bored at Baker,” named after the school’s library, decided that these foul-mouthed ruffians deserved a little of their own medicine. Well, more than a little, and not quite the same medicine, if you get my drift:
The comments offered streams of profanity-laced insults about the protesters’ ostensible sexual orientations and appearance, and included calls for physical violence against them involving razor blades and other weapons.
“Why do we even admit minorities if they’re just going to whine?” one commenter asked. “Wish I had a shotgun. Would have blown those [expletive] hippies away,” wrote another.
(cont)
In response the protestors created their own online blog, Real Talk Dartmouth, to post screenshots of some of the worst threats, and to stimulate dialogue regarding the issues of racism, sexual assault and homophobia present at Dartmouth. As one of the activists who participated in the protest stated:
“We were well aware that attempts to speak truth about personal discomfort on campus are socially punished at Dartmouth,” said Karolina Krelinova, a junior who was one of the demonstrators … “But we definitely did not expect anonymous death threats and other very hurtful comments and threats both online and in person from people we keep meeting on the sidewalks and in cafeterias.”
Dartmouth administrators, somewhat to their credit, condemned the threats of violence, and cancelled classes Wednesday. In their place, programs to “address the crisis” were held instead.
The college announced in a letter to students that it will hold “alternative programming… that promotes respect for individuals, civil and engaged discourse, and the value of diverse opinions.” From the programming, it’s not immediately clear that the school plans to discuss Dartmouth’s notoriously pervasive culture of sexual assault, victim-blaming, and policies that continue to fail students (exactly what the protesters, during their initial outburst at a prospective students’ event, had called for). But administrators promise that the programming will address the threats.
One might ask why the protesters chose to take direct action to disrupt an officially sanctioned Dartmouth event to make their points, rather than raising their complaints with Dartmouth’s administration first. Well, it appears that route has been tried before, with little or no success. For example …
Sexual assault is rampant at Dartmouth; some female students say they circulate the names of men considered “dangerous” and fraternity houses viewed as “unsafe.” Between 2008 and 2010, according to the college’s official statistics, Dartmouth averaged about 15 reports of sexual assault each year among its 6,000 students. Brown, a school with 8,500 students, averaged eight assaults; Harvard, with 21,000 students, had 21. And those numbers are likely just a fraction of the actual count: One study showed that 95 percent of all sexual assaults among college students are never reported. In 2006, Dartmouth’s Sexual Abuse Awareness Program estimated that there were actually 109 incidents on campus…
Nearly every woman I speak to on campus complains of the predatory nature of the fraternities and the dangers that go beyond drinking. “There are always a few guys in every house who are known to use date-rape drugs,” says Stewart Towle…
One senior, who I’ll call Lisa, was “curbed” the second night of her freshman year. She’d been invited to a fraternity by one of its members. Thinking it an honor, Lisa enthusiastically accepted, and once she got there, she had two drinks. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital with an IV in her arm. “Apparently, security found me in front of the house. That was my introduction to the frats: passing out from drinking, waking up in the hospital and not having any idea what happened.” What she did notice were bruises that looked like bites on her chest that hadn’t been there before. “To be very honest,” she says, “I didn’t really want to know what actually happened.”
How did Dartmouth’s President respond to these allegations? By setting up a “project” to study “high-risk drinking,” which Dartmouth’s own PR spokesperson admitted did not address the sexual assault issue and the rape culture at Dartmouth. On the contrary, Dartmouth’s President “coddled” the most notorious offenders, the Dartmouth fraternities, even meeting with them to assure the “frat-boys” that he had no intention of investigating the numerous abuses that had been reported regarding their behavior. As Janet Reitman of The Rolling Stone reported, Dartmouth’s Greek culture, which promotes racism, sexism and homophobia, has been around for a very long time.
… Dartmouth, whose unofficial motto is “Lest the Old Traditions Fail,” has resisted that transformation, just as it has stood fast against many other movements for social and political progress. Dartmouth was one of the last of the Ivies to admit women, in 1972, and only in the face of fierce resistance from alumni. In 1986, conservative students armed with sledgehammers attacked a village of symbolic shanties erected on campus to protest South African apartheid. More recently, students assailed members of an Occupy vigil at Dartmouth, heckling them with cries of “Faggots! Occupy my asshole!”
“Dartmouth is a very appearance-oriented place,” sophomore Becca Rothfeld tells me when I visit the campus in February. “As long as everything is all right superficially, no one is willing to inquire as to the reality of the situation. Everyone knows that hazing goes on, but no one wants to discuss it – just like they don’t want to talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, classism.” She shrugs, apparently resigned to the situation. “People don’t really talk about things at Dartmouth, let alone argue or get outraged about them.”
So much for the elite liberal establishment being more progressive about rape than southern colleges such as the University of North Carolina, which has also been recently called out for it’s shoddy reaction to the treatment of rape victims. When it comes to the entitlement shown to rapists, our entire higher education system, from the Ivies to public universities, is an equal opportunity offender. My daughter goes to college this fall as an entering freshman at a school that has a 70:30 ration of men to women. Frankly, the more I learn of this issue ans its widespread nature throughout our universities and colleges, the more worried I become for her safety. In the 21st Century that shouldn’t have to be the case. Unfortunately, in this area, our technological progress has once again exposed our lack of moral progress as a society.
What happens when the mask of privilege is ripped off the rising scions of the ruling class with their legacy admissions.
thanks for bringing this to light. just heard about it yesterday
Worth mentioning that it kind of sucks that this happened:
“A group of current students who were on the stage and in the middle of their second skit, ducked behind the curtain to avoid a confrontation with the protesters, said 19-year-old freshman Jessica Ma, one of the Dimension show performers.”
In other words, they disrupted something that their fellow students had worked hard to put together, without consideration for them or their efforts. Sure, that’s how you get attention, but is it how you convince people? Disruptive protests can certainly be effective (think Rosa Parks), but you need to target the right people.
None of this excuses the vitriol that has been circulating online, but this kind of protest screams “Code Pink” to me. The ultimate in self-congratulatory and ineffective onanism.
It’s not that ineffective when the end result is that it’s a national story and the campus is shut down for a day to address it.
A core principle, at least in Gandhian circles, of nonviolent protest or direct action is that it will provoke a reaction that proves your point far more effectively than your words or actions could. The protesters had every reason to expect this to be the case, though apparently they didn’t expect just how virulent it would be. And I guarantee you they were speaking for other people on that campus, too.
Do the threats and anger honestly surprise you, Steven?
I’ve done a fair amount of anti-rape and anti-domestic violence over the years. Of all the issues I’ve worked on – pretty much anything to do with social justice or peace, at one time or another – nothing else came close to provoking the sheer unbridled anger and hatred – sometimes profane, sometimes violent as well – of anything involving gender. There are a lot of very angry men out there, either bitter from unfortunate personal experience or straight-out misogynists, or both – who consider themselves victims whenever their sense of personal or societal entitlement is brought into question. They are by far the nastiest people I’ve ever dealt with in the course of doing activism work, and that’s a high bar.
Those people don’t materialize out of thin air. They’re trained to think that way – by their family, their church, their friends, some aspects of pop culture, and in many places (including, it seems, Dartmouth) their education. Everything they experience and do then gets passed through that filter. It’s massively ugly, and most women I’ve ever known have, consciously or subconsciously, developed a radar to detect and avoid them.
That radar, obviously, does not always work, especially when you’re young. But one of the most pernicious aspects of male privilege is that even though I live in the heart of a big city, I can go a long time without worrying about my personal safety. For any woman who lives on my street, it’s a low-level but constant concern. In other parts of town, including where we last lived – and the thing we miss least about our old neighborhood – it’s not low-level at all. And while it doesn’t usually include the personal safety aspect, at least in this part of the country, the same privilege to be oblivious applies to my race, too.
A-fucking-men, Geov. No other issue, none, provokes this level of intense hatred. None. It’s been my experience as well.
In a conversation with a Dartmouth employee a few years ago, I was informed that newly independent (no longer living at home, on their own for the first time) young women today are not emotionally equipped to deal with their choices.
This person told me the most of the female students that file rape charges weren’t raped at all, but are feeling guilty and ashamed the next morning about having sex the night before with a boy they liked, and so they file charges to make their decision to have sex ‘not their fault’. They believe that they wouldn’t have had sex on their own, so the boy MUST have forced her to do it.
This person was emphatic to delineate the very few actual rapes that do occur from the vast number of young women that file charges because they feel shame from having had sex.
And there is something to that argument: actual rape, like what the frat-boys do with rohipnol at their parties, versus a one-night stand that elicits shame the next morning. It is almost impossible to determine which complaint is someone feeling guilty from someone who was violently raped.
So is it right and fair for a woman who said ‘yes’ the night before to file rape charges in the morning against the boy she slept with because she felt guilty and wishes she had said no?
How many of these complaints that the administration bury are actual rape and how many are bad late-night decisions that weren’t rape at all?
I don’t know and I don’t have an answer. I do believe that there is some quantity of rape charges at colleges that are not rape at all. I don’t know what that percentage is, but I can not deny that this is true.
It doesn’t seem fair to me to blame the boy in these specifically limited cases for the girl’s feeling guilty and ashamed – after having said yes.
Of course this happens.
But just about every peer-reviewed study that’s ever been done on the topic finds that the number of such cases are dwarfed – by orders of magnitude – by the number of women who are raped but for any number of very good reasons choose not to support it.
To use the Dartmouth example, Dartmouth is basically the only reason the town of Hanover, New Hampshire (pop. about 6,000) exists. The campus dominates a small, isolated community where, judging from this story alone, the social pressures to not report a sexual assault are a formidable obstacle for a young, already victimized woman to overcome. Common sense says that a lot of women decide that spending another year or two being re-victimized by the attitudes of many of their peers – in addition to the usual traumas involved in navigating the justice system in such cases – isn’t worth it for them.
So, yes, in specific he said-she said issues we never really know what happened – nobody ever does other than the parties involved – and sometimes, yes, the woman is lying. (I say that as someone who once had a literally crazy ex-friend call all my friends and accuse me of having raped her – and having done so in a way that, as most of my friends knew, happens to be physically impossible for me. Her accusation was preposterous on its face, and she was a seriously non-credible accuser, but it was still a scary experience.)
But people who use the reality of false accusations to dismiss the issue out of hand, or claim that it applies to most such charges, are rape apologists. Period. Those same people never, ever talk about actual rapes that go unreported, because they’re not trying to make an honest argument. They’re cherry-picking the one aspect of rape accusations that fits their misogynistic pre-existing conclusion, and ignoring all other ones that don’t.