Today’s Guest Column
Letter to the editor:
As a student here for almost four years, I have yet to make sense of the university’s safety notification systems. Yes, the function is quite clear, but the content we receive still leaves me befuddled.
I’m sure all of us have heard stories of assault from friends — stories that never see the light of day in terms of our alert system. Monday night, I received notice of a sexual assault that occurred when a female met a male in a bar who sexually assaulted her at her residence later that night. I have countless friends who have been assaulted similarly, and, as evidenced by the Clothesline Project and plain old statistics, there must be literally thousands of women with similar experiences on this campus. Yet we get this one crime alert, once.
Last semester, I remember receiving an alert involving a man inappropriately touching a woman at a bar. I personally have been touched inappropriately in crowded bars monthly, and I’d venture to guess many women would say the same. I would never in a million years condone this — of course I find it utterly deplorable and frustrating. But still, a lot of students wondered, why are they telling us about some girl who got her butt grabbed? When I received the alert, something stirred within me, too.
To the women who had to go through this: I’m so sorry and so proud of you for reporting it. You are not the problem — you are the solution.
What irked me about these alerts was the implication that they were individual, isolated events — as in, that things like rape don’t really happen here, but if they do, you’ll hear about it (once a semester).
We all have a legal right to protection of our bodies, personal space and comfort. Yet we, especially women, have become so used to getting our butts grabbed by strangers at bars that we may forget these acts are not just frustrating — they are criminal.
Sexual assault is just as much a crime as theft, if not worse, and it deserves the same treatment from us as victims and University Police. Reporting a sexual assault is, of course, a difficult issue, because it’s not always what victims want to do or feel they can emotionally handle. But think of the potential effect of reporting all of these “minor” offenses. I think the message would be read much more clearly if every weekend, or even month, we got a crime alert about assault, which frankly wouldn’t be a stretch at all. It would be the truth.
And maybe the influx of emails, instead of one measly message that we all skimmed and sent to our trash just as quickly as we received it, would open up the conversation about the prevalent rape culture on this campus enough to prevent even one incident.
Alex Huss is a senior English major.
