LAST WEEK, the Take Back the Night program held a series of events to remember University sexual assault victims and to heighten awareness about these crimes. Among those events was a mock trial by the Sexual Assault Board, which featured a shortened version of what an actual trial might be like. Although fake, the trial still gave powerful insight into the complicated nature of sexual assault and how it's handled in court-like proceedings. Events like this do a great job at raising community awareness about sexual violence, its prevention and its prosecution, but sexual assault continues to occur with disturbing frequency at the University. Ultimately it's the community itself that must wake from its slumber and change its ways. Accomplishing this great feat requires broad shifts in the way our community understands and reacts to these heinous crimes.
The trial was a microcosm for our preparedness as a community. It included a woman accusing a man of rape and two witnesses -- one for each side -- defending the claims of their friends. Sexual assault and rape crimes at the University generally involve some sort of alcohol, and a major theme in the mock trial was trying to determine how much the man and the woman had drunk before the alleged rape occurred. Detailed investigations precede trials that reach the Sexual Assault Board, so the panel hearing the cases is well-informed about what happened and knows what questions to ask to get critical information about the incident, such as how much a person with a given weight would need to drink to pass out, among other things.?
The chair of the Sexual Assault Board, Nicole Eramo, said that most of the time students pursue official legal channels --through the police and the District Attorney -- before coming to them. If those fail to produce anything, however, the Sexual Assault Board is something of a last resort. Eramo said that the Board processed three trials over the past 18 months, although there were many more mediations and other settlements that never went to trial. If found guilty of sexual assault, the most serious offense, it's very likely that a student will be expelled from the University.
Some of these details may seem mundane, but they highlight the remarkable degree to which we as a community are prepared to handle sexual assault. We have the resources and the willpower, so why are women -- and some men -- still raped at the University?
Unfortunately, we live in a society that spends too much time telling women how to avoid rape and not enough telling men to stop raping. The onus generally seems to be on women to protect themselves -- boys will be boys, apparently. Many men feel that their arousal somehow entitles them to something -- in this case a woman's body. Some have difficulty viewing women as full human beings with their own identities. Dehumanization is intricately connected to violent acts like rape regardless of who commits them, men or women.
Sentiments like stigmatizing the victim have existed throughout history, but they've especially been exacerbated by some regrettable and prominent judicial traditions, thanks to a seventeenth century English jurist, Matthew Hale, whose pronouncements on rape solidified the legal burdens on victims, on top of the cultural ones they already faced. The "Hale warning," a statement that was often read aloud to juries in common law systems before a rape trial, argued that rape was very difficult to prove and "harder yet to be defended by the party accused." This proclamation, designed to scare juries into doubting the victims, was regurgitated well into the twentieth century, to the detriment of countless women, creating something of a cultural philosophy.
The most effective way to deal with rape is to culturally reconsider the kind of thinking spawned by the Hale warning and other equally misguided philosophies. Ideas have consequences; change the way that people think, and you can change the way they act. If it's too utopian to think that rape can be completely eradicated, then drubbing it to the point of near-irrelevance should be achievable, both in our University and in American society at large.
Erald Kolasi's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ekolasi@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
EDITORIAL: Carla Williams deserves her seat at the table
By Editorial Board | 2 days agoLooking beyond basketball and football reveals that Virginia Athletics is, in many ways, thriving.
UPADHYAYA: The Great and not-so-Good sides of U.Va.’s 2030 housing plan
By Apal Upadhyaya | 4 days agoInstead of improving the dire state of existing infrastructure, however, the University has shifted attention away from it and chosen to expand.
EDITORIAL: Support low-barrier shelters in Charlottesville
By Editorial Board | 5 days agoInvesting in low-barrier shelters now will pay off in increased stability for the homeless, which will undoubtedly improve the safety of shelters and the community writ large.
