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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Rape Raises Question: Who Are Those College Boys? - Bloomberg

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Photographer: Lance King/Getty Images
The University of Virginia suspended its fraternities and related social activities... Read More
Whoever said the line is lost in our memory -- someone we knew? some public persona? -- but the line about parenthood, about why you’d rather have a boy than a girl, managed to stick.

It was something to the effect of, “When your son turns 16, you have a 16-year-old boy on your hands, but when your daughter turns 16, you have every 16-year-old boy on your hands.”

Now that Rolling Stone has blown open the issue of campus rape with its expose of the University of Virginia -- as if the scores and scores of other reports weren’t enough -- the line’s not as clever as it used to be.

Here’s a question for you: Would you rather your kid return from college as a rape victim or a rapist? Because while the young women in these circumstances are coming home shattered, the young men in them are returning as something worse.

In the aftermath of the UVA story -- and, just as an aside, when did Rolling Stone turn into an investigative outfit? -- we learned yesterday that the UVA administrator overseeing matters of sexual misconduct at school has never moved for the expulsion of a student nor, she says, ever even seen one expelled for sexual misconduct, even those who have confessed to it.

Nicole Eramo, the associate dean of students at UVA, is both lionized in the article by students for her dexterity in handling victims and undercut by the reporting, which shows the policies, and Eramo’s wielding of them, contribute to inaction and are complicit in keeping, well, rapists on campus.

We spoke to a recent female graduate of UVA, and guess what? Same thing happened to her. Not on the level of violence as described in the Rolling Stone article, but it was a sexual assault, occurring at the end of her sophomore year.

Which is to say, it wasn’t even at all difficult to find yet another story. Make a couple phone calls, and voila.

Yes, she told friends, but no one else, no one in a position of authority. She explained that, as unfortunate as the assault was, she didn’t feel like anything could be done about it. She said it’s difficult to have that kind of conversation with an administrator, and she just felt like she could deal with it better on her own, accept it and go on. In other words, she felt powerless."



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