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Prevention of Date Rape On Campus

by Mark Plimsoll

How to implement an "Early Warning System" that consists of a public database where authorities help college- population victims add names and briefs of their complaints against supposed aggressors, and perhaps the accused would also have opportunity to response to the charges. We sell the idea by showing that the Ivory Tower of American education, which now hosts students from other countries, economic statuses, cultures, and religions and has never functioned as a melting pot of traditions; the student's various expectations while dating cause tension, confusion, misunderstanding, and the resultant problems demonstrate a need for readjustment.

COSTS:
The cost of the database should be minimal or next to nothing after design, once an agency with an established presence on the Internet agrees to host the database, and access remains controlled by responsible agencies, such as Crises Centers and Police Departments.

ANALOGY:
Besides being a clearing house for potential problems, much as the Better Business Bureau or a Credit Reporting Agency, the process of entering data should also educate.
Students say things like "I realize that sexual harassment is a kind of rape." If we refer to a whole range of behavior from emotional pressure to sexual harassment as "rape," then the idea itself gets diluted. It ceases to be powerful as either description or accusation."
In our database, the process of crises centers and authorities helping victims to enter data would reduce the incidence of rape in one important, often overlooked way: The database should encourage that each participant share equal responsibility towards sexual relations, and help equalize the degree of fault in cases involving misunderstandings of traditional models of gender-behavior and gendered responsibilities.

TRADITIONAL SEX ROLES:
Supreme Court of Mexico ruled in June 1997, that forcing a spouse to have sex is not rape but a mere ''undue exercise of a right"! (InterPress Service) The wife could not refuse her husband's demands unless he was intoxicated, had a STD, or if other people were present.
Colleges have distributed pamphlets with titles like "Friends Raping Friends: Could It Happen to You?" which promote their own perspective on how men and women feel about sex: men are lascivious, women are innocent.
"Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has had sex and feels violated," writes Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor and feminist legal scholar best known for her crusade against pornography. The language of virtue and violation reinforces retrograde stereotypes. Throughout history, women's bodies have been property, with value as chaste objects or for the exclusive use of her husband, as virtuous vessels to be "dishonored," "ruined," "defiled." A woman's purity, or lack of, has measureable value.
Gillian Greensite, founder of the rape prevention education program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, writes that the seriousness of the crime "is being undermined by the growing tendency of some feminists to label all heterosexual miscommunication and insensitivity as acquaintance rape."
"It is often falsely assumed," Greer writes, "even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female" and "so is insistence upon a passive sexual role [Greer's italics] . In fact, the chief instrument in the deflection and perversion of female energy is the denial of female sexuality"and substituting a false and weak femininity, or basic sexlessness." In other words, the traditional passive sexual role of women threatens by means of a denial of female sexual agency which propels us backwards into traditional inequalities, chauvanisms, and interpersonal expectations contrary to human and sexual reality.

Even modern females often want to be catered to; they want doors opened for them, their meals and entertainment paid for, and if we accept those traditional attitudes, then it's okay for a man to demand sex if he buys a woman dinner or gifts and it's not wrong for a man to rape a woman who previously had sex with him or other men.
Catharine MacKinnon writes: "Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike."
The movement against rape, then, not only dictates the way sex shouldn't be but also the way that it should be. It enforces some idea that Sex should be: Gentle, non-aggressive; equal, without domination nor submission; tender and respectful, and therefore never communicate the uncontrollable fires of a consuming desire.
The REALITY OF SEX: "No" often does not mean "no", but rather it manifests a part of the instinctual dance of courtship and mating, of teasing and submitting. Fundamentally, almost all Sexuality in nature depends upon display, seduction, and domination to a submissive. Makeup and dressing sexy, the exageration of the female human's secondary sexual characteristics, men percieve as foreplay; display, teasing and submitting, domination and submission, and even include activities described as kinky, exciting, sensual, pleasurable, and yet all natural and eventualy, fundamentally violent.
If any naïve soul thinks women can't be dominant, Shakespeare wrote, "There are more things between heaven and hell than are even DREAMT ABOUT in your philosophy."
A controversial joke: "You can change your mind before having sex, even during sex, but not after." If you change your mind after sex and think you were tricked into it, you're on the slippery slope to date-rape.

National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape
2325 Oak Street, Berkeley, CA 94708
http://members.aol.com/ncmdr/index.html
Rape pamphlets' Common Advice to Men: Accept a woman's decision when she says "no." Don't see it as a challenge.
Unfortunately, that runs at odds with contemporary glamorization and "pornographization" of culture. Naomi Wolf writes in "The Beauty Myth" that our contemporary "cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation (among the young) in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events."
In acknowledgment of these realities, the databaseshould be free of bias and chauvinism toward either sex or sexual orientation. For instance, one study showed 74% of the men and 55% of the women had been drinking or using drugs prior to the sexual assault. The database must be free of traditional value judgements, or it could ignore statistics like these.
Although it sounds strange at first, the database should ask questions and accept data in a non-gender specific way.

DATABASE DESIGN:
Definitions of date-rape commonly inclulde "verbal coercion" or "manipulation". Verbal coercion is defined as "a woman's consenting to unwanted sexual activity because of a man's verbal arguments not including verbal threats of force." The belief that "verbal coercion" is rape pervades workshops, counseling sessions and student opinion pieces. The suggestion lurking behind this definition of rape is that men are not just physically but intellectually and emotionally more powerful than women.
Our database designers must use non-gendered language, the challenge consists of imagining themselves, as men or women, in whatever sexual orientation, devising phrases that would make the supposed victim publically acknowledge their own psychology regarding the relationship, which would complement any response from the supposed perpetrator who must also have right to add to the database.
Some sample questions to reveal these possibly ammeliorating circumstances to a tragic situation might be::

Drugs:
"If you willfully drank alcohol, or agreed to take drugs, DO YOU FEEL CERTAIN that you are not responsible, and that someone took unfair advantage of you afterwards?"
"Are you sure the other person tried to get you drunk first, and you can say honestly you did not try to get drunk?"

Verbal Manipulation:
"Do you think it reasonable that this other person believes you were taken advantage of, that you were manipulated into unwanted sexual activites, and that you have reason to feel violated?"
"Do you feel that a threat to your self-esteem or reputation caused you to enter into unwanted sexual activities with this person?"
"Did this other person describe you as non-sexual, frigid, or impotent and that forced you into unwanted sexual activities?"

Realtionship Parity:
"If you feel dirty or used, do you think the other person knows they acted criminally and took away your self-respect?"

Reality Check:
"Since what happened, do you have trouble eating, suffer from inappropriate shyness or mood swings, and wish to blame these problems on the person you now claim took advantage of you?"
"Do you think it possible that someone can be verbally forced into unwanted sexual activities?"
"Did you value your virginity and feel that someone has robbed it from you?"

CONCLUSION:
The program of an interactive database to register claims of campus assaults should help students analyze and recognize sexual politics within the student body, it's myriad cultures and interpersonal expectations, and take responsibility to avoid situations that would cause them to feel they had experienced an unfair sexual activity.
Whether or not one in four college women has been raped, considerse themselves raped, or had a terrible date with an unfairly characterized ex-boyfriend, will always and certainly remain a matter of opinion, but at best we can hope for a more informed opinion, instead of some mythic and unreal mathematical fact based on gender and sexual orientations that grow out of traditional role models that no longer reflect the real world, and in fact, never did.