During her third week as a freshman student at Georgetown University three years ago, Kate Dieringer, now a 21-year-old senior, was raped.
The man who allegedly assaulted her was not a stranger from town lurking in the shadows. He was an acquaintance, a friendly upperclassman involved in orientation activities for freshmen. She had no reason to mistrust him.
She said he invited her and some friends from the residence hall to a party where they drank alcohol. As the group left the party, the orientation leader managed to separate Dieringer from her friends and took her to his apartment on campus, where she thought there was another social gathering. But the apartment was empty. Dieringer said she felt lethargic and sedated, and the next thing she remembers is the young man on top of her, raping her.
Drowsy and probably sleeping on and off for several hours, Dieringer next remembers being fully dressed and standing by the bed, looking at him. Eyes closed, he pulled on a pair of gym shorts and turned against the wall, telling her: “Fine, be a stupid freshman bitch.” She struggled with the locked door and fled.
Dieringer is a survivor of what is called “acquaintance rape,” differentiating it from “stranger rape.” The latter is the crime women grow up fearing, but they are more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone they know.
Freshmen students, like Dieringer, who suspects a drug was put in her drink, are often targeted.
They’re away from home in a new environ-ment, partying far away from their parents’ watchful eyes, and they may be unsophisticated and too trusting.
“Whether it’s a college campus or an urban community, the sexual predators look for the most vulnerable people to victimize,” said David Lisak, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and a forensic consultant.
“On college campuses it’s widely known among this type of perpetrator that freshmen women don’t have information and don’t have confidence. … They’re more likely to be manipulated and conned. And so they make good targets.”
They also are unlikely to report these sexual assaults to authorities. They may fear retribution by their attacker and interrogation by authorities–or they may even be concerned about their attacker’s future.
A 2000 U.S. Department of Justice study on sexual victimization of women on college campuses indicated that less than 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement.
Acquaintance rape is of such concern on college campuses that orientation programs for new students are likely to include sessions specifically about acquaintance rape.
All colleges and universities are required under provisions of the federal Clery Act to send statistics on reported rapes to the U.S. Department of Education. The data is not independently verified.
Most colleges in the Chicago area have reported sex offenses at zero or very low single digits each year during 2000 to 2002, the most recent statistics on the U.S. Department of Education Web site (www.ope.ed.gov/security/Search.asp). But those numbers include only reported offenses.
Greg MacVarish, dean of students at DePaul University, said acquaintance rape is one of the most difficult issues to deal with because it is so underreported.
Heather Imrie, assistant director of the Campus Advocacy Network at the University of Illinois-Chicago said many “schools try to hide their numbers. I think that just fosters a more dangerous environment. If you don’t talk about it, you’re giving power to the rapists.”
The Clery Act is named in memory of Jeanne Ann Clery, who was a freshman at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania when she was raped and murdered in 1986. It requires schools to make warnings about crimes and publish an annual report disclosing campus security policies and three years’ worth of crime statistics.
The Clery Act also mandates detailing of educational programs to create awareness of rape and other sex offenses, and the procedures followed when an incident occurs.
“Some schools do a better job than others,” said S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus Inc., a non-profit national victim assistance organization based in Pennsylvania. “By and large, more needs to be done. They need to do more and have a more appropriate response system in place.”
Schools focus on drinking
Carol Bohmer, a sociologist and lawyer at Dartmouth College, is co-author of “Sexual Assault on Campus: The Problem and the Solution” (Simon & Schuster).
Bohmer said some schools have very good programs but administrators tend to focus on orientation sessions about drinking.
Lisak, who has studied the perpetrators of acquaintance rape, said that because these rapes usually occur in conjunction with alcohol, “a lot of people somehow [surmise] that alcohol causes it and that if people would stop drinking then these rapes wouldn’t happen.
“That’s a mistaken notion. The alcohol is a weapon. Rapists use it to render the victim more vulnerable.”
Lisak said that perpetrators often gravitate to groups of like-minded men, including fraternities or athletic teams. A minority of men commit these acts, but Lisak said the hard-core offenders do it repeatedly. In research he did at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, he said repeat rapists averaged close to six rapes each.
For Kate Dieringer, rape led to a tailspin. Depressed, ashamed and fearful, she ignored the phone and rebuffed her friends. She was afraid of being alone but being in crowds terrified her.
The next semester, her attacker was in one of her classes and Dieringer’s anxiety and depression worsened. It was then that she went into therapy and began taking medication for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
One day in the spring, she saw her attacker’s name scrawled in a bathroom stall on campus as part of a list of Georgetown men not to date. That gave her the courage to report the crime to the university. But she said she was viewed with skepticism.
In general most students do not turn to campus judicial systems. Dieringer described the hearing process as akin to a second assault. Her attacker was expelled, but then his punishment was reduced to a one-year suspension on appeal. Dieringer had to sign a confidentiality agreement to learn the outcome.
Last year, Dieringer complained about the confidentiality agreement to the U.S. Department of Education. In a ruling this July, the department held that it is illegal to make campus rape victims sign a confidentiality agreement in order to be told the results of a disciplinary action taken against their alleged assailant or talk to others about the case.
Dieringer said her fight against the confidentiality agreement was part of the healing process. She is scheduled to graduate with a degree in nursing in the spring.
Most colleges and universities, including Northwestern, the University of Chicago, DePaul, Loyola and the University of Illinois, offer counseling services for campus rape victims. But Anne Bent, a Lake Bluff resident, is working to establish Anne’s Home Just in Case, a non-profit counseling center for campus rape survivors in Chicago.
“They may not be using the counseling facilities on their campuses,” she said. “They may not want other people to know. They may fear the perpetrator.
“A center removed from their daily life, a completely anonymous environment, would encourage women to continue their education and provide support over the long haul.”
Undisclosed numbers
Bent’s concern was sparked when her daughter started at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio three years ago. She attended an orientation program for parents about acquaintance rape.
“Here was this bucolic, homey setting with a safe feeling. I was astounded to hear up front that rape was a problem there.”
Miami University has had rape awareness programs as far back as 1980, said Jane Goettsch, director of Miami’s Women’s Center.
“There is no reason to think the problem here is any greater or lesser than it is at other schools,” Goettsch said. “But when you’re able to encourage victims to report [because] they know they will be treated with respect, that is likely to increase the rate of reporting, we believe.”
Bent believes “a lot of schools will talk about acquaintance rape in a general way, but they don’t want to admit how many are raped [for fear] of affecting their admissions, which is their money.”
In fact, Bent said that when she went to one local foundation seeking funding for her proposed center, the director, who once worked at a university, said, “Oh, the dirty little secret of college life.”
“I said, `Well, as a matter of fact, it’s not little. It’s a big problem and it’s not a secret in college communities anymore.'”
Sasha Walters, director of advocacy services for Rape Victim Advocates in Chicago, said that students are more likely to continue their studies if “there is good support, the survivor is believed and the perpetrator is asked to leave the school. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen on campus very often. Survivors often end up transferring schools or dropping out.”
Just like stranger rape, the aftermath includes depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual dysfunction, mistrust of others, social withdrawal, damage to the reproductive system, sexually transmitted diseases and possible unwanted pregnancy.
“College students are future contributors to our society, and the economic cost of rape is estimated to be several billion dollars a year, Bent said. “It has been called a rape tax.”
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How to protect yourself
Alcohol affects judgment. Getting drunk will always make you more vulnerable to sexual assault or assault of any kind.
– If you choose to drink, pace yourself to one or fewer drinks an hour.
– Keep track of how many drinks you’ve had.
– Avoid someone who makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
– Make a pact with friends that no one goes to or from a party alone.
– Don’t accept open container beverages from anyone but a bartender or trusted friend.
– If you’re not sure a drink is yours or if you’ve left it alone for any time, get a new one.
– A sign that you have been slipped a date rape drug is that your level of intoxication/impairment is disproportionate to the amount of alcohol you have consumed.
– The first few times you go out with someone, meet only in a public place.
– Always carry money for transportation in case you need to get home on your own.
– You have a right to say what does or does not happen to your body.
– You have the right to say yes. You have the right to say no. You have the right to change your mind at any time.
– Just because someone begs, asks or spends money on you does not give him or her the right to have sex with you.
— Courtesy of the Wellness Center of Loyola University Chicago
