Graphic by Kayleigh Woltal
Content notice: sexual violence, rape
When touring my liberal arts college for the first time, the student guide pointed out a little box on a lamp post and said it was called the Blue Light System. Essentially, there were similar alarms set up all over campus so that someone in danger could call for help if needed. It was heavily implied that this was a preventative measure against sexual violence.
I was taken aback – I thought that sexual assault was reserved for party schools with a strong Greek life presence, where frat parties went all day and all night – where weekend football games were THE event to attend. Rapists were strangers who drugged their victims at bars, or jumped out of bushes. I understood rapists to be the Brock Turners of the world, to be a term synonymous with frat bro who loved sports and cheap beer.
At a school of artists and creatives, where the music department was foundational to the institution’s history and the coveted film program was regarded as one of the best on the east coast, how could there be sexual violence? I was surrounded by indie soft boys who carried guitar cases and sketchbooks – shouldn’t I be safe?
Needless to say, during my time at college this illusion of safety was shattered. I have experienced sexual violence, and every perpetrator has been a so-called creative, sensitive type. The stories of my friends and classmates are the same. Rape, and the culture of sexual violence on college campuses, is not reserved for frat bros and jocks, who radiate toxic masculinity. Liberal arts students are just as capable of harassment, assault and rape. No amount of nail polish or Joan Didion quotes on their Instagram feed can cover up their misogynist views that manifest into sexual violence.
A common factor in sexual assault in college is alcohol – this is not some outlandish, unfathomable fact. According to this study from 2016, “two-thirds of student rape victims are intoxicated or impaired by drugs at the time of the incident.” The same study states that football and other sporting events “increase daily reports of rape with 17-24 year old victims by 28 percent.”
This statistic is supplemented the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), who states on their campus sexual violence page that “more than 50% of college sexual assaults occur in either August, September, October, or November.” One semester at college and you know that those months are the ones of lots of sporting events and heavy day drinking – so, it seems obvious that sports and the subsequent partying DO play a role in sexual assault on campuses. But what about the schools where sports go relatively uncelebrated?
Here’s the thing: the idea that rape is a phenomenon exclusive to party schools – to frat parties, sporting events, the like – is misguided. In reality, the number of sexual assault cases reported are relatively the same across the board between different classifications of campuses. In 2020, the peer reviewed journal Violence Against Women released a study entitled: “Do Party Schools Report Higher Rates of Violence Against Women in their Clery Data?” Through their data, it was found that party schools – which are defined by Greek life presence and athletic programs, among other factors – “did not report more rapes, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, or fondling than other classes of universities.”
Even if alcohol does play a role in sexual assault, what people seem to forget is that liberal arts schools have their own culture of parties and substance use. At my school, thesis films are funded by “fund-ragers,” and people black out listening to local bands at DIY venues every weekend. People offer weed as an act of hospitality with the casualty as someone asking if you want a glass of water. Where to get LSD and shrooms is a badly kept secret. Just because people aren’t drinking and doing drugs with the backdrop of a frat house doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
In their study “The Relationship between Alcohol Use and Sexual Assault Incidents in Educational Settings,” researchers Enid S. Colon, Julian Wells, and Catherine Chambliss found that – against their initial hypothesis – the small liberal arts college had the highest rate of alcohol usage of all the schools they studied and that “no significant differences in reports of sexual incidents were found among the campuses.”
Sexual violence is an issue across all types of campuses. This 2015 poll found that 20% of women and 5% of men are sexually assaulted during their time at college – that’s one in five women and one in twenty men. Think of how that statistic looks in real life – how many people are in your classes? How many people do you pass while walking to your dorm, while in line at the dining hall, while in the library? Who among those people are victims? Who are the perpetrators?
I often find myself thinking about this tweet, which suggests that rapists are hard to identify. Most rapists don’t even realize they’ve enacted sexual violence – that they’ve violated another human being.
Rape culture is rampant at liberal arts campuses, but the misogyny flies under the radar, hidden by stick n poke tattoos and paint covered Carhartt overalls. It is the subtle iterations of rape culture in alternative spaces that often make it so hard to unpack and define because they deviate from popular culture and the scenarios posed by Title IX programming. In my social circles, sharing complicated feelings have allowed us to understand and label our experiences as sexual assault. Through feedback from peers in safe spaces, we can see clearer that what happened was wrong, we’re allowed to be upset about it, and see that it was, in fact, an act of sexual violence.
I’ve had too many conversations on dorm room floors where the response to someone’s hushed confession is: “that sounds like sexual assault.”
I am tired of students not being given accurate language and tools to understand and prevent sexual violence. The hypermasculinity of frats and sports and alcohol have become a synonym for rape culture, leaving liberal arts students at a disadvantage in understanding the misogyny that permeates their school. Someone isn’t harmless just because they have a septum piercing and a pair of Docs.
When it comes down to it, a frat bro spiking a girl’s drink at a party has the same intention as an artsy stoner type smoking up his Tinder date so he can coerce her into sex. One of those situations is ranted about as the pinnacle of rape culture. The other is accepted as just how things are in college.
At my freshman orientation, there was a lecture about rape and us first years were told the basics: don’t walk alone, never leave a drink unattended, check in with your friends when they’re on dates, etc.
I do those things. My friends do those things. College students all over do those things. And still, campus sexual violence is a pervasive issue. Rapists can be the art major, the musician, the photographer, the STEM student. They can be unassuming, and can even seem like avid feminists. But when it comes down to it, they perpetuate a system of violence and of silencing victims – just in more covert ways.
When I walk across campus under the glow of blue lights, I wonder how many people have actually used the alarm system and been protected. I don’t know. I do know this: I am not afraid of the stranger in the shadows like I used to be. I am afraid of the rapists who sit next to me in class, who hide their true selves under paint stains and nail polish. They are just as sinister and far more real.