by Meghan Daum
The crowd on the lawn at Iowa consisted of sixty or so students and a smattering of faculty, staff, and people from the community. When I arrived, a young woman in cargo pants and a hoodie was speaking into a microphone. She read from her phone, her thumb scrolling as quickly as she spoke.
Her words were powerful. Framed as a letter to a relative who had abused her, the words sounded almost like poetry. Why did you touch me when I was seven, and again when I was twelve?, the woman asked. Why did you climb in my bed? With rising emotion but without breaking down, she went on to describe a wrenching pattern of incest, denial, and, finally, the cognitive dissonance she felt when she cared for this relative as he lay dying in a hospital bed, never betraying her secret so as to protect other family members. I let them remember you the way they wanted to. I didn’t do that for you.
Next up was a young man, presumably gay, who talked about thinking “this kind of problem” didn’t have anything to do with someone like him. “But then someone I thought was my friend took advantage of me.” This speaker was followed by another man, presumably straight, who got up and delivered a monologue so filled with platitudes you’d think it had been compiled from public service announcements. We are all victims of this society, but we are also the survivors that can transform the culture. We must end rape culture and move toward consent-driven culture.
A woman stepped up to the mic and began describing a series of fumbling maneuvers under blankets with a male friend. Her story was opaque and glancing, like a dream you try to recollect in the morning. There were hands (his) and blood (hers). There was, by her description (and to my mind, though I’m not a doctor), more blood than would likely result from even the most aggressive digital deflowering. There was the added detail that “I didn’t know it was rape” until weeks later.
Her emotion was contagious. Sadness for her welled in my throat. I may have wondered about the accuracy of some of the details in her story, but her feelings were impossible to wonder about. There was no question she was in pain. Something had hurt her and that hurt now encircled her.
* * *
I had recently met a young man—I’ll call him Joseph—who had his life upended earlier that year when a woman reported him to the dean of students for sexual misconduct. It’s not that I thought this woman could have been the one who reported Joseph. I was certain she was not. Still, aspects of her story reminded me of the one Joseph had relayed to me. With both this young woman and Joseph’s accuser, there appeared to have been some lag time between the actual encounter and the conclusion that something criminal had occurred. (For Joseph’s part, he’d thought the encounter, albeit awkward, was totally consensual.) I could imagine any number of avenues the woman could have taken to reach this conclusion. Maybe she really was so naïve as to what constituted rape that it took weeks to arrive at the answer to what for someone else might have been a very simple equation.
Or maybe the equation wasn’t so simple. Maybe an activist-minded friend helped reframe the encounter from something awkward into something criminal. Maybe she stumbled upon a Tumblr account expounding on the qualities of rape-you-didn’t-realize-was-rape and it proved revelatory. Maybe—and unlikely as it seemed, I’d heard enough about this sort of thing not to rule it out—the woman told her mother, or even both parents, about the encounter. And maybe those parents gave in to some kind of primal parental inclination to believe that their daughter had not gotten herself into an unpleasant sexual predicament of her own volition but was instead manhandled against her will like the gentle flower all parents know their daughters to be. And, maybe, to appease those parents, the young woman adopted that version of events for herself.
Or not. I could have been all wrong. Certainly none of my hypotheticals were entirely right. Most likely, the facts of the situation were buried beneath so many layers of interpretation and reinterpretation that trying to figure out the truth was beside the point. As the woman stood before the crowd, looking triumphant, it occurred to me that no matter what had happened to her, no matter how large that trauma figured in her memory and self-concept, the main event was perhaps taking place right now. However much blood there was or wasn’t, it was this new state of being, this deliverance into survivorship, that possibly was most important now.
I chewed over these thoughts as my pants became laced with grass stains. I remembered how George Will had entertained thoughts along the same lines in a Washington Post column in 2014 and was duly eviscerated not just on social media and in the feminist blogosphere but by the overall media establishment. Questioning the relentlessly repeated statistic about one in five women being the victims of sexual assault during college, Will (as I was reminded when I went home from the rally that evening and looked it up on the internet) characterized this victimhood as a “coveted status that confers privileges.” He lamented the federal overreach that forces colleges and universities to enact chaotic adjudication procedures that leave the accused party with few due process rights. Predictably, Will was tarred as sexist, out of touch, and, naturally, a rape apologist.
For my part, I remember feeling like Will was essentially correct and yet incredibly stupid for mounting such an argument in something as public as a newspaper column. I was writing a newspaper opinion column myself then, and whenever I dipped my toe into the waters of campus sexual politics I made sure to burn major calories letting my readers know that I was aware sexual assault was really, really bad and should be taken really, really seriously and that expanding its definition into relative meaninglessness (some codes of conduct classify things like a grope at a crowded party as assault) denigrates victims more than it empowers them. I also noted that Will had made a classic columnist error and tried to cram about six different ideas into 750 words (pro tip: don’t exceed one idea per 800 words). He went on about microagressions, speech codes, college drinking, the fungible nature of statistics, due process, and the Obama administration’s ham-handed initiative to establish a rating system for universities.
As a result, his underlying point, which (at least by my reading) was that elevating victimhood actually minimizes the seriousness of assault, got bollixed up in thousands of misreadings and ideologically driven backlash. “It’s Time to Fire George Will,” rang the headline in U.S. News & World Report. “If The Washington Post does decide to fire Will, it will at least send a message that all women have the right to live free of sexual assault,” wrote a columnist in Psychology Today. Scripps College disinvited Will from a speaking engagement. Four U.S. senators with “an ongoing interest in ways to reduce sexual assaults on college campuses” (their wording) wrote a letter to Will censuring him for trivializing what they called the “scourge” and “spreading epidemic” of campus rape. Media Matters, a progressive organization devoted to fighting misinformation in conservative media, later named Will “Misinformer of the Year.”
Will refused to back down, saying in an open letter to the four senators published in the Washington Post that he believed he took sexual assault more seriously than his critics, “which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it.”
As I sifted through the digital wake of this brouhaha, I found myself grappling with the same cognitive dissonance that follows me into just about every discussion about campus sexual assault. I’ve never been the victim of assault myself. I came damn near close once when a stranger followed me on a dark street—and no, I’m not talking about the ginger-haired guy who shoved my collarbone. But the number of women and men I know who are not so lucky could probably fill a medium-size sports arena, probably one with even greater capacity than my aforementioned football stadium filled with toxic females. Many of these assaults took place in childhood at the hands of family members or other known parties. In some cases, the abuse left a psychological imprint that somehow set victims up to be targets for further abuse throughout their lifetimes.
When it comes to the “one in five” statistic, it’s impo
rtant to know what’s being measured and how. I’ll talk more about that in a few pages, but for now I’ll say I’m more inclined to give credence to data that suggests one in five girls is a victim of childhood sexual abuse. That comes from the National Center for Victims of Crime, which puts the rate of childhood sexual abuse of boys at around one in twenty (this sounds low to me, actually). There’s also data showing that people who suffer sexual trauma as children are more likely to be revictimized as adults, including almost fourteen times more likely to be assaulted in college, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A friend who’d survived such trauma once put it this way: “After you’re abused once, you become a target. It’s almost like they can smell it on you.”
* * *
I’ll return to Joseph. He told me he’d been a virgin when he came to college. He’d had a few girlfriends in high school, he said, ones he’d met through his Catholic youth activities, but it was all fairly chaste. Early in his first semester at the University of Iowa, Joseph heard through friends that a girl in one of his classes liked him. That is to say, her friends told his friends that she thought he was cute. Joseph received this news favorably. As such, a date was arranged, at least insofar as any college student, in my time or in these times, ever goes on a date. That is to say they hung out.
They hit it off, he told me. The date lasted many hours and included stopping by a house party off campus and later swinging by a burger place. Joseph said the woman kept talking about a movie she loved that he’d never seen, and they decided to go back to his dorm room to watch it. It was by now around two a.m., and Joseph’s roommate was asleep in the bottom bunk bed, but they climbed into the top bunk and began watching the movie on his laptop.
“She kept looking away from the movie and looking up at me,” Joseph recalled. “Like craning her neck like she wanted something.”
He said he was happy just to watch the movie. He liked this girl and didn’t want to rush anything. Besides, he was tired and his roommate was asleep right below them. But then she abruptly stopped the movie.
“She slapped the laptop closed and said, ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ ” Joseph told me. “And she just kind of climbed on top of me and started making out.”
What Joseph described next I’ll relay here to the best of my ability, and depending on your inclination, you can mentally underscore it with a bass line from the grumbling chorus or not. He said the woman seemed eager to have sex and that he told her he’d never done it before and asked if she was sure she wanted to. When she said that she did want to have sex, he got out a condom but lost his erection as soon as he put it on. Some time later (and here the details are fuzzy and admittedly I didn’t want to pry) they managed to have intercourse but without the condom. Even so, he says, the woman gave no indication of regretting what had happened, though she did turn down his offer to walk her back to her dorm.
A few days later, Joseph told me, the woman texted him and said that she was worried about the unprotected sex and wanted him to send her money via a digital-wallet app so she could buy the Plan B birth control pill. He said he readily complied and that they had a few friendly or at least cordial exchanges after that. Two weeks later he received a letter from the dean of students saying that he was being brought up on unspecified sexual misconduct charges. Afraid to tell his parents, he consulted a lawyer, whose fee he could never begin to afford. Still, he went to an initial meeting with the associate dean of students, feeling not terribly worried, since he was confident that he hadn’t done anything wrong. The associate dean gave little hint as to how Joseph’s story was going over, saying only, “It sounds like you came in here prepared.”
A little background on what “prepared” might mean in this case, which I’m going to lay out in some detail because I believe that some of the people with the strongest opinions about this issue don’t fully grasp just what they’re opining about. It all started with the now-infamous mandate known as the “Dear Colleague Letter.” In 2011, a wing of the U.S. Department of Education, called the Office for Civil Rights, sent a nineteen-page letter to more than 7,000 colleges and universities stating that their federal funding would be at risk if they were found not to be “taking immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence.” To make this directive legal, it was tucked under the rubric of Title IX, the 1972 education statute that prohibited discrimination in schools on the basis of sex. The idea was that victims of sexual assault or misconduct who were forced to remain in school with their assailants were being deprived of their rights under Title IX.
Foremost among the immediate and effective steps was the requirement that, when adjudicating sexual assault complaints, schools use a standard of proof known as the preponderance of evidence. This meant that officers who heard a case could find a student guilty of misconduct even if those officers were only 51 percent convinced of the student’s guilt. (In the actual judicial system, criminal cases like sexual assault are held to the higher standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The preponderance-of-evidence standard is used in civil cases.)
It was odd enough that the government was ordering campus tribunals to withhold due process rights in ways that would never be tolerated in the outside world. Worse in many ways, though, was that the other immediate and effective steps were subject to interpretation by individual colleges and universities. And because administrators were terrified of losing federal funding—in an off-the-record conversation in 2016, the dean of a prestigious liberal arts college told me he had essentially lived in a perpetual state of confusion, exasperation, and paranoia since 2011—most erred on the side of the most stringent implementation.
The inconsistency effectively resulted in a kangaroo-court system throughout American universities. There were cases of accused students being sanctioned without even being informed of the charges against them. There were cases where accusers were not permitted to be cross-examined while defendants were forced to answer questions without being informed of their rights or allowed to have an attorney present. Even more troubling, the inconsistency allowed universities to get away with playing fast and loose with the rules to protect certain parties. In other words, a star athlete accused of assault could theoretically be subject to different proceedings than a regular guy on an academic scholarship.
So there’s my attempt at a cursory overview of the effects of the Dear Colleague Letter. Others have dug into it with far more depth and context than I need to here. Emily Yoffe has done outstandingly thorough reporting in places like Slate and the Atlantic, as has Robby Soave in Reason. In her 2017 book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, the Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis offered a meticulous and rather gobsmacking account of the ways in which Title IX can be a runaway train. But there’s a reason I wanted at least to summarize it here. Many people reading this book who care about the problem of campus sexual assault automatically assume that whatever the Obama administration did to curb it was unequivocally the right thing to do. These are the people who were appalled in September 2017, when Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Trump, announced her intention to roll back the guidelines of the Dear Colleague Letter.
“The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over,” DeVos said, adding that “any school that refuses to take seriously a student who reports sexual misconduct is one that discriminates. And any school that uses a biased system toward finding a student responsible for sexual misconduct also commits discrimination.”
Never mind that all DeVos said was that the policy was going to be reviewed through a notice-and-comment period and that nothing was happening imminently. Never mind that Harvard Law professor and New Yorker writer Jeannie Suk Gersen did the nearly unthinkable and gave DeVos the imprimatur of that publication, writing on the New Yorker website that “DeVos appears to be proceeding exactly as an agency head should . . .” The online indignati set the tone. “Breaking: @Betsy DeVosED just made campuses safer for r
apists,” said the Women’s March Twitter account. A Slate headline went “Finally, a New Policy We Know Trump Truly Believes in: Protections for Sexual Assaulters.” When DeVos met not just with survivor advocacy groups but also with groups like Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) and Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), which advocate for due process rights for accused men, she was likened to a men’s rights activist. Joe Biden, eager for any opportunity to anneal his brand as an avuncular champion of women (sure, he mishandled the Anita Hill hearing back in 1991, but, hey, had he not introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990?), called the decision “shameful.” The hashtag #StopBetsy picked up speed on Twitter, with activists like Amy Siskind tweeting that DeVos’s proposal was “the next step on our path to authoritarianism.”
I understand the sentiment and simmering—okay, boiling over—frustration. I may have been less apoplectic than many of my liberal friends in the face of this particular recommendation, but I’m still a liberal and still find DeVos to be a troubling, even repugnant, specimen. I think she has no business being in the position she is in. I recoil at just about every idea she puts forth. I believe her school voucher program is Christian proselytizing in disguise. However, I also strongly suspect that if the rollback of the Dear Colleague Letter had come from a more palatable source, very few people would have blinked an eye. Because the truth is that the policy wasn’t working. Plenty of liberals, even liberal feminists, had been saying so for a long time. As far back as 2014, twenty-eight professors at Harvard Law School published an open letter in the Boston Globe calling the Obama policy, which Harvard had just enacted, “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “inconsistent with many of the most basic [due process] principles we teach.” Three years later, just weeks before DeVos’s announcement in 2017, four of those professors, Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, all self-avowed feminists, sent a memo to the Education Department in support of DeVos’s rollback, saying the definitions of sexual misconduct had been made far too broad. “They go way beyond accepted legal definitions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment,” they wrote. “The definitions often include mere speech about sexual matters. They therefore allow students who find class discussion of sexuality offensive to accuse instructors of sexual harassment.”
