include factually stated impacts of alcohol and drugs upon dating behavior, accountability
for personal behavior, common sense measures to avoid at-risk situations, ways to help
other students, e.g., buddy system at parties and taking car keys, procedures to report all
rapes, confidentiality of counseling and treatment, and finally, college consequences for
sexual assaults. A ?No tolerance? policy should be clearly stated. The sooner we begin to
educate, the sooner date rape might come to an end.
Unfortunately, America?s education system is often unmotivated to correct injustice
on it?s own initiative. In reality, funding is a primary motivate and a tuition-paying student
body means a continued funding flow. Perhaps it is time for students to demand to know
the safety, as well as the academic standards, of the colleges they may choose to attend.
Parents need to determine if administrators establish a campus where their daughters and
sons do not fear for their personal well-being. This includes the proclivity of a campus
toward acquaintance rape. Such information should be demanded and could be provided
easily. Institutions could include statistics of reported student-on-student crimes (not
convictions), by type, in all marketing and recruiting materials and school bulletins.
Statistics could be reported across the previous five years. Colleges and universities should
also report the measures taken that respond to the trends. This could be done either
through voluntary adoption by colleges (successful marketing and recruiting by those
institutions with good safety records could make this common practice), by Department of
Education policy, or enactment of law. In the long run, measures that prevent
acquaintance rape will ?pay off? for universities.
America cannot eliminate acquaintance rape by ending dating. We must redefine
dating and other social interactions between men and women; how we relate as parents,
siblings, friends, peers, co-workers. This means teaching children to break the model of
aggression/passivity that marks male and female interaction. Schools must promote
constructive ways to deal with conflict and anger and teach everyone the responsible use of
alcohol, the dangers of drugs and rejection of the myths that so often contribute to belief in
?justifiable rape?.
?Only by promoting the idea of sex as a mutually undertaken, freely chosen, fully
conscious interaction … can society create an atmosphere free of the threat of rape.?
30f