Understanding the relationship between sexual assault statistics and our lives

Another white guy: Activists must listen and empathize to have more effective conversations

The tone of activism on campus has made it stop working.
The constant repetition of the same few arguments about privilege has resulted in a climate where we feel it is only acceptable to share one type of narrative about injustice. As such, I believe it is vitally important for me to question that narrative and to offer an alternative.Consider the Meeting in the Union the Friday before last. Two-hundred students gathered to listen to speeches about inequality. One speech, billed as dealing with sexual assault, recounted a female student’s experience of trying to turn down a man at a party by dancing with her female friend, only to have him follow her and ask, “So you girls like dancing together?”
After this and a series of other stories, the assembled students marched to President Barry Mills’ office to deliver a nine-page letter of demands for institutional reform. Among other things, the letter called for harsher condemnation of students who participate in events like Cracksgiving, a public statement of solidarity with students of color, a declaration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as an official College holiday, and more conversations on race in every aspect of Bowdoin life.
Before I explicitly criticize anything about this rally, I want to make an important distinction: I am not trying to discredit the legitimacy of any of these stories or complaints. I am not suggesting that anyone shouldn’t be upset or doesn’t the have right to be angry at the man in MacMillan House who pursued her after she said no. Those feelings are real and valid.
But this story was presented at a rally for 200 people and followed by a list of institutional demands; there is more at stake than simply whether the story is legitimate.What matters is if that story, when publicized, will effectively combat injustice, if it will motivate people of different backgrounds—students or faculty—to overcome the fear of difference and better understand one another.
What is the purpose of writing a letter demanding a public statement on the national racial climate when Mills already sent out an email encouraging empathy with students feeling affected by the Ferguson, Mo. non-indictment?
Why demand that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day be recognized as an official College holiday when Mills already publicly announced that he is trying to achieve that very goal by 2020?Why damn the administration for failing to show solidarity following Cracksgiving, when Tim Foster, Dean of Student Affairs sent out a page long email condemning the actions of the men who participated in that act?
What do we achieve by pointing out problems that the administration has already acknowledged exist and are already trying to solve? All it seems to prove is that inequality still exists.
But I have never heard a Bowdoin student articulate a belief that racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, or transphobia don’t exist. The only disagreement on our campus is to what extent they exist and how to best eradicate them.
It is no longer productive to simply point out that racism exists. We need to take the next step. We need to stop entrenching ourselves in our identities and start reaching out. We need to start asking how we can overcome the barriers we face and find a sense of belonging together.
That man in Mac House is not hopeless. That story didn’t end with sexual assault, just with a man needing to be told “no” a few times before it sank in. I am not excusing this, but to me he sounds more misguided than malicious. He probably didn’t realize how he made that woman feel, and she probably didn’t realize that he didn’t know.
He could be taught to understand if we attempted to empathize with him, to patiently educate him, and—following Martin Luther King’s approach to battling injustice—to love him.You may argue that it is not the responsibility of a marginalized group of people to teach its oppressor to be better. That is true. You, as a woman, have no responsibility to teach a man not to harass you.
But choosing to be an activist is committing yourself to a cause that transcends just your identity. An activist must strive to take action that continually moves the community forward, even if that action involves educating those you’d rather shame. An activist has a responsibility to remove blame, recognize that we all want the same thing, and strive for understanding.
This fall, while working on a US Senate campaign, I learned that by far the most effective way to persuade someone is to listen to them and truly try to put yourself in their shoes—to show that you understand why they view the world the way they do.
No one will listen to you if you don’t listen to them first.
The two most important questions we as activists can ask ourselves are: “What does it feel like to be that man in Mac?” and, “How do I show him that I understand, so that he might try to understand me?”

Another white guy: Whatever it is, we need to acknowledge our race without being defined by it

I always forget until I see these articles published that next to everything I write is the phrase “Another White Guy.” I am momentarily taken aback, and I question why I made the choice to preface myself with those words.
I’ve heard similar anecdotes from friends and acquaintances who always seem on the verge of telling me that the title is unpalatable.
But why should it be? It’s true! I am just another white guy and we all know it. Why is it so unnerving for me to acknowledge it?
Part of the problem is that whiteness is usually invisible. Black actors play the black character, whereas white actors get to play characters defined by characteristics entirely separate from their race—the funny one or the villain. This means that identifying oneself by race is an active, unimposed choice. I think it makes people uncomfortable that I would choose to identify with a race that is usually associated with prejudice and oppression.
But as long as blackness is coded as something, I want to make whiteness coded as something too. I want to make it clear that I have not had average experiences, I have had white experiences.
In her article last week, Emily Simon ’17 asserted that by my column’s acknowledgment of my whiteness and guyness, I am “proudly [claiming] ownership of [my] status.”
For some reason, us white people seem to think that attempting to hide our whiteness will give us more credibility. This fundamentally misses the fact that choosing not to identify by our race is an exercise in privilege—in the power over our identity that our whiteness affords us. I want to disrupt that by making my whiteness unavoidable.
More importantly, though, hiding from our race means refusing to engage with the complexity of our identities. My ancestors’ success was founded on slavery and my parents’ on segregation. My existence is coded with histories of violence. I am among the millions of white male voices that have dominated American society and culture since the establishment of this country.
But treating class and privilege as dirty secrets does not make them go away; it only gives them more power and entrenches us further in our differences. Because our reaction to race and gender is this reverent uneasiness, I am incapable of acknowledging my being a white dude without reducing my identity to solely these traits.
I either don’t talk about my race or I’m on team racism.
Neither of these are productive ways of moving forward. Further, for us to even pretend it is possible not to notice my whiteness is a farce.
I could have titled this column something other than “Another White Guy,” and it would have made it easier for you to not think about my race and gender. But you still would have thought about it. You just probably wouldn’t have said anything about it out loud.
I proclaim my status simply by existing. I get paid more, there are more places I can live, I am less likely to get arrested, and if I do, I spend less time in jail. I exude whiteness in everything I do—erasing it is impossible.
We need to work towards neither hiding our race nor defining ourselves by it.
With this title, I’m trying to confront the weirdness of being white and wanting to be a good person. I’m trying to be upfront about the humorous irony here, the egotism I must have to think my thoughts on social justice are so profound that it even makes sense for me to write a column whose goal is a world with fewer columns written by people like me.
And yes, the name is tongue-in-cheek. Race is awkward and complicated and full of contradictions very few really understand, and the truth is that there are aspects of my relationship with race that are kind of funny.
So maybe I just shouldn’t talk about it, then. I think there are many among us who don’t think there is anything funny about race, so is it disrespectful for me to write about it in this way?I see the legitimacy of this argument, but I also believe that confronting whiteness is a fundamental piece of confronting racism. Particularly in this community, where 66 percent of us are white, restricting conversations about injustice to solely identities of color would mean disengaging 2/3 of the school. This is not the path to racial understanding and community.
I gave my column this title to be upfront about who I represent: I represent somewhat self-aware white people who have messy, problematic relationships with race, and I honestly believe Bowdoin needs that.

Another white guy

Understanding the relationship between sexual assault statistics and our lives

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

April 3, 2015

I recently had a discussion where I found out that a lot of my friends are terrified of being falsely accused of sexual assault. They think it could happen at any moment and that there is nothing they can do about it.

As if reading from a script, everyone had something to add:

“You know the girl carrying around the mattress? I was reading about it, and it seems like she made it up.”

“I had a friend who it happened to and it’s kind of ruined his life. He was asked to take a semester off without a hearing, and when he came back he found out she had dropped the case. The worst part is that even though I have no reason to, part of me still doubts him just because she said it.”

“It’s like the worst form of slander—your friends stop liking you; you can’t get a job.”

I was shocked. I had never worried about falsely accused men. When sexual assault came up, my first thought was always for the survivor. It has always felt like my duty as a feminist to trust any woman who accuses a man of rape.

In order to debunk my friends’ claims, I began researching false reports of sexual assault on college campuses. I had heard that only two percent of accusations were false, and I wanted to confront my friends with the facts.

I found numerous studies that estimated what percentage of reports are false. Though most put the percentage between 2 and 11 percent, there was almost no consistency. David Lisak, a prominent psychologist who studies the behavior of rapists, found that six percent of reports were false and 14 percent did not include enough evidence to make a determination of their accuracy.

That study was done at one school: American University. I am skeptical that a single school can represent every college in the country, only included cases that were reported to the university’s police.

I was also surprised to find out that there is very little consistency in how consent is defined; American University calls sexual contact non-consensual if one party is “under the influence of a controlled or intoxicating substance.” Any amount of alcohol or drug, then, could arguably prevent someone from giving consent.

Bowdoin’s policy says that people cannot give consent in a state of “incapacitation” that prevents them making “informed, rational judgments. States of incapacitation include, without limitation, sleep, blackouts, and flashbacks.” With different samples of women and different versions of consent, it didn’t seem to me that Lisak’s study was even relevant to a place like Bowdoin.

It started to become clear that there is no existing research that can give us an accurate understanding of how often false accusations happen at colleges.

I started questioning other statistics I’ve heard. The study finding that one in five college women experience sexual assault or attempted sexual assault has been widely cited. The study only surveyed students two large public universities, however. Again, two large public universities cannot adequately represent the entire nation.

The study also included someone “rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes” in its definition of sexual assault. While this forced contact is undoubtedly unacceptable, it is clearly not what people imagine when they hear “sexual assault.” This data, too, did not seem applicable to our conversation.

I looked into the Center for Disease Control (CDC) report that recently found that one in five women in America (not just in college) experience rape or attempted rape. The study found that two million women, 1.6 percent of the female population, experienced rape or attempted rape in 2011. In a Department of Justice survey, 250,000 women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape. Confusing things further, the FBI found that only around 80,000 cases were actually brought to police.

Perhaps this discrepancy comes from the CDC’s language: it asked women if they had ever experienced specific sex acts while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”

Critics have been quick to point out the word “or” prompts women to include drunk or high sexual encounters to which they consented. On the flipside, the range of encounters this language encompasses allows for the inclusion of instances that women might be hesitant to self-label as rape. Should we be including instances that the victim herself doesn’t consider rape? There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer.

The more I learn about these statistics, the more I realize how unhelpful they are. I don’t buy just 80,000 cases in a year, but I don’t buy two million either. It’s nearly impossible to come to a conclusion about rates of sexual assault when there is no widespread agreement on what sexual assault and consent are.

Ultimately, I don’t think we can apply this data to our everyday lives. My friends can’t prove their fears are valid and I can’t prove they aren’t. We’re all just going off our contradictory and irreconcilable gut feelings.

All I can say is this: I’m going to pay close attention to the sobriety of my sexual partners to make sure that they’re not anywhere close to “incapacitated.” If I do that, I seriously doubt I’m going to be accused of sexual assault.

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