This video will give a clear overview of the current situation on Yale's campus:
CNN News Video: Yale's "hostile sexual environment"
Breaking: DOE's Office for Civil Rights to investigate Yale for "hostile sexual environment" (3/31/11)
Saporta: A justified claim (4/1/11)
Students, admins react to Title IX complaint (4/4/11)
Miller updates on Title IX investigation (4/6/11)
Administrators believe Yale did not violate Title IX, Miller says (4/7/11)
Yale comments on Title IX (4/8/11)
"Strategy sessions" examine sexual climate (4/12/11)
Yale not alone in Title IX probe (4/15/11)
One atom of carbon. One atom of oxygen. One person forgets to turn the stove burner off and one stream of colorless, odorless carbon monoxide molecules spreads through the air. Barely discernible until someone is inexplicably overcome by fatigue, headaches, nausea. The symptoms of poisoning reveal themselves, and unless they are acknowledged and addressed, the victim succumbs to the eternal sleep. Similarly, sexual assault pervades college campuses, and when the symptoms reveal themselves, it’s often too late. One student is raped, another assaulted, and soon a rape culture is created. The damage is done, souls are crushed, and working to rebuild the individuals’ lives and heal the hurt takes time, guidance, care, and often legal endeavors. The problem is, the response to sexual assault on most campuses is reactive, responding to the problem after it has manifested itself, rather than proactive, addressing the issue before individuals fall victim to it. When thinking of carbon monoxide poisoning, the source of the problem is often a bit simpler to resolve, both reactively and proactively. The gas must be contained so that it doesn’t enter the air in concentrated amounts, so the leaky gas valve must be sealed and the gas supply must be shut off. However, issues of sexual assault and harassment prove more difficult when generations of societal messages that condone the gender performance of masculinity through power over others (usually women, but also men) must be overturned. For this reason, legal efforts that attempt to address public demonstrations of sexual harassment only target the symptoms of a rape culture, not the source of the problem. Efforts that address and give voice to private, less visibly obvious instances of sexual assault will have more long-lasting and significant impacts as universities and colleges attempt to shift attitudes so that safe sexual environments are experienced for all.
Recently, sixteen Yale students and alumni filed a complaint against the university stating that Yale did not respond adequately to a number of public incidences of sexual harassment on campus or to private incidences of sexual assault. Examples of these incidences include: Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity students chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” in the residential area where most first-year women live (who are the most common victims of sexual violence on college campuses); male students who ranked Yale first-year women by how many beers it would take to have sex with them; Zeta Psi fraternity student pledges who stood outside the women’s center with a sign reading “We Love Yale Sluts!;” and private instances of sexual assault in which students reported their case to the university’s Sexual Harassment Grievance Board and were discouraged from pursuing the case through the police or more punitive on-campus disciplinary boards. Because Yale is not maintaining a safe sexual environment for women, the complainants are contesting that Yale is not upholding Title IX, the civil rights law that protects against discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs which receive federal funding. As a result of this complaint, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is conducting an investigation of Yale’s practices and potential violation of Title IX.
Ironically, the public displays of sexual harassment continue to receive more media attention, even when the media acknowledges that this should not be the case. Saporta, a Yale student, expresses in a column in Yale Daily News, that “many students feel that so much focus on public incidents of sexual harassment, which they see as examples of ‘boys being boys,’ takes away from what they feel is the far more pressing matter of physical sexual assault on campus.” Saporta accuses these students of failing “to see the connection between public acts of misogyny and private acts of violence.” While I agree that there is an inextricable link between public and private acts of sexual assault/harassment and I only see benefits resulting from the OCR’s investigation to protect student well-being on campus, I do not see this investigation as a solution to sexual climate issues on Yale’s, or any other school’s, campus. I see this investigation as beneficial if it encourages discussions and opens discourses up to women's issues, in classrooms and in casual conversations between students. Students initiated the complaint, and students are usually aware of what is problematic in the school environment and what specific issues need to be addressed. What message are the incensed Yale students conveying about the discourses present at their school when they alert the national authorities about possible breaches of Title IX? It seems to indicate that they do not feel they can make any progress by speaking and negotiating with other students, staff, and faculty. The reality is, national authorities can lay down the law and dictate Yale's conduct, but the national offices do not interact daily with the Yale community. Also, as Charlotte Bunch points out in her article "Whose Security?," those who dictate national decisions and efforts may have a broad and amorphous national agenda, rather than a clearly-defined and executed human rights agenda. Those in the campus community, students, faculty, and staff, must be on board and committed to change before change can even begin to occur.
Amid the Title IX violation claims, many people at Yale have become defensive, which does not help the community progress positively from these allegations. The first article in Yale Daily News concerning the recent complaint, explains that "the Task Force on Sexual Misconduct and Prevention [was] commissioned in the wake of the 2008 'We Love Yale Sluts' incident" ("DOE's Office for Civil Rights . . . ," 3.31.11). This task force was created reaction to an incident, when it could be argued that it should act proactively constantly so that "We Love Yale Sluts" incidents do not occur at all. The Dean of Yale College, Mary Miller, cited "several committees, reports and other measures taken by the University toward correcting sexual misconduct on campus in the past three years" ("Students, admins react to Title IX complaint," 4.4.11). The presence of initiatives does not ensure that they are operating effectively or when needed by the community. However, the Women's Center at Yale seems to be approaching women's issues, specifically sexual assault, in more promising ways. The Women’s Center, in an undertaking unrelated to the Title IX accusations, has held a week-long series of “strategy sessions,” which “are geared toward brainstorming ways in which Yalies can combat sexual misconduct” (“‘Strategy sessions’ examine sexual climate,” 4.12.11). Although students initiated this complaint, student discussions about the campus's sexual climate in safe campus spaces can allow voices to be heard. I wish the article had further explained the conversations occurring in these meetings, though they seemed to be movements in the right direction.
In our Women's Studies Center at Colgate, these encouraging, open, and honest conversations seem to happen without much inhibition. While Colgate is not a model school for low instances of sexual assault, there are niches and safe places (I think of Yes Means Yes seminar, Safe Zone trainings, brown bag lunches, lectures, Take Back the Night march and speak out) where at least some students feel comfortable sharing their ideas and thoughts about sex and sexuality on campus. We are also fortunate to have considerable faculty and staff support, in the aforementioned spaces and in one-on-one conversations with adults and role models on campus (which larger schools with more students and less staff per student cannot provide). In conversations with other Colgate students I encounter in women's studies courses and events, the "dichotomiz[ation of] 'public' and 'private'" (73) that Enloe points out, with public pertaining to that which affects the political realm and private pertaining to women's and personal issues, does not present itself as two discrete categories. Rather, women's issues are given voice and it seems likely that sexual harassment and assault will be resisted, not tolerated.
As Jonah Gokova suggests, “men need to change their attitude towards sex . . . [by] begin[ning] to see it as an opportunity to communicate mutually with women, rather than as a chance to dominate and conquer” (Freedman, 421). This communication needs to begin before sex, in large-group and small-group discussions about how sex can be meaningful and respectful to everyone involved. Professor Claire Potter of Wesleyan University notes in "A Letter to My Students: Stop Rape Now By Doing These Ten Things" that "men need to talk to other men about why men rape and and women need to talk to women about why they insist on making rape a private matter." Conversations need to occur across difference, gender identification and others, to address the impact that rape and sexual assault has on campuses and what campus community members find important to address. National forces can contribute to changing the campus sexual climate, but a community of students, staff, and faculty must be committed to the goals of decreasing sexual assault and harassment at both private and public levels, appropriately punishing sexual attacks when they occur, and cutting off the fuel supply (overturning myths, interrupting harmful social messages and constructs) of ideas which perpetuate rape cultures on campuses.
Works Cited
Bunche, Charlotte. "Whose Security?" The Nation. 5 Sept. 2002.
Enloe, Cynthia. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Print.
Freedman, Estelle B. ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Print.
Yale Daily News articles that are linked above from March 31 to April 15, 2011.
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