The lack of a public response to the Guides incident from the administration, the Guide Service and this newspaper is reprehensible. Hazing should be unacceptable regardless of who perpetrates it and we should not shy away from holding some institutions accountable for the sake of tradition or discomfort.
Ultimately we must modify the legal codes that pit due process against Title IX to the detriment of student sexual-assault survivors. But even in the context of a flawed system, we can work to improve the lives of students affected by sexual violence, and prevent other attacks.
The free flow of information is a beautiful concept when applied to the news or to theories and ideas; it is something altogether more sinister when someone’s professional reputation is at play.
But when I was 16 and in high school and wore floor-length butterfly skirts, I believed that anyone who could possibly even have the slightest afterthought of dating me was a miracle from God. When he came along, I was just getting over the emotional impact of being told by another male classmate that I looked like a horse at the homecoming dance. We were snacking on pretzels in a parking lot and I said yes.
Ten years ago, the University community was shaken by the murder of one of our students, a fourth-year woman only weeks from graduation. She had worked so hard to complete her college education, and had her whole life ahead of her, and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Who killed her? The man who professed to love her. Think you know the name of this student? Guess again.
It’s ordering way too many Campus Cookies and crying over how good they are. She laughs, at long last. She also eats for the first time that day. You knew she couldn’t resist warm cookies. You had a plan.
As a community, we tend to want to ask a person who reveals that they were assaulted: “What happened?” We want to know if they said no, or whether the people involved were drinking, and whether the “victim” fought back — as if the answers to these questions determine whether the trauma has occurred or not. Regardless of whether it will stand up in a court of law, if someone calls it trauma, the best thing you can do is to assume that that is how the person experienced it, and support them in seeking help.
Everyone has a preconceived notion of what sexual assault looks like, but almost everyone is probably wrong. In reality, most of these assaults — over 80 percent — will occur where someone lives. The vast majority will be perpetrated by someone the victim knows. It might be a date, but more often, it will be a friend of a friend, a classmate or someone else the victim knows. Alcohol will be probably be involved.
The twin messages of “you should want sex!” and “don’t you go having sex!” are too much for anyone to bear, and create a toxic environment where we don’t know what to expect, often drowning our uncertainty in alcohol before diving in. We live in a society that is sexually traumatizing down to its very language, so how are we supposed to talk in an open, healthy way about sex, much less sexual trauma?
With student victims, we have four paramount concerns: safety, emotional and physical health, academic support and reporting options. In terms of safety, we want to know: Does the victim feel safe in her residence? Is she concerned that she may be targeted again?
As much as I want and believe that rape should be a single-sanction offense, it is legally untenable and impossible given the state of American justice today, which involves part of our very Constitution. To make rape a single-sanction offense involves either raising the standard of proof to a level that violates Title IX or sacrificing the viability of countless cases by mirroring the justice system, which only successfully prosecutes 4 percent of rapes every year (most of which, I will add, are stranger rapes with DNA evidence).
The University placed 25th overall in the rankings the center posted online. Of the five disciplines the center surveyed, our faculty members supposedly wield the most influence in sociology (eighth) and politics (18th) and least in anthropology (64th).
Even if it would have caused problems for its business, the NFL should not have tried to jeopardize important neurological findings.
As the nation and student body are faced with the gravity of these dual threats being used by the Republican Party to extract otherwise unattainable policy concessions, the situation raises a puzzling question: Where does this situation leave the University’s student activist?
Woo took on the deanship in a time of upheaval. So will her successor. The next dean of the College must be able to keep a clear head in a turbulent environment.
Of course, there is no way to fully prove that there is a link between a Board member’s campaign contributions and his or her appointment to the Board, and any politically savvy governor would deny that such a relationship exists (as McDonnell has via his spokespeople). But even if these positions were not used for patronage, there is still little sense in leaving these appointments to the governor.
So here we are, faced with the admittedly awkward situation of a majority of the members of the Supreme Court, shortly after attending the Red Mass, hearing arguments in a case about government entanglement with religion.
But even if we accept these micro obsessions for certain types of diet and exercise as consistent with good medical standards (they aren’t), our student culture of health and wellness is lacking, for a simple reason: it consistently (and often intentionally) disregards the importance of mental health.
A more substantive threat to job prospects — and to online reputations more generally — comes from a different corner of the Web. For students who have been arrested, a sloppy Facebook profile is the least of their worries. The recent advent of for-profit mug shot websites threatens to box some students out of the job market.
The only person quoted in the article is someone who does nothing but hypothesize about what might happen with an e-verify system and raises possible privacy issues. Though privacy concerns are legitimate, an article that draws from another newspaper report and includes only supposition doesn’t help inform readers.
