Gray Matters
considering rape on columbia's campus
T he September 2007 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine looked at first glance like most other issues of that glossy, sex-drenched magazine. A tanned, moisturized Jessica Alba pouted on the cover, next to hot pink text: “His #1 Sex Fantasy,” “Feel Sex More Intensely! A Guide to Your Body During the Deed.” It wasn’t all so glamorous: a smaller headline lamented, “My Boyfriend Didn’t Change His Boxers for 3 Months!” The life of a Cosmo woman isn’t all orgasms and mascara, after all. Sometimes laundry rears its ugly head.
The real surprise was tucked in the bottom right corner, however, under an innocent pink banner advertising “Cosmo News” in white lettering. Delicately framing Jessica Alba’s well-toned curves in small black text was the headline, “A New Kind of Date Rape You Must Know About.” Never one to steer clear of controversial sexual issues, Cosmo had overstepped its bounds.
Written by Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alum Laura Sessions Stepp, the article introduced a phrase that would quickly become a dirty word in women’s rights circles: “gray rape.” Defined by Stepp as “sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial,” gray rape was rapidly decried by legal experts, antiviolence activists, survivors of assault, and readers in general. Not only is it legally problematic, inching toward the idea that rape can be a perpetrator-less crime, but it places blame squarely on the women who, Stepp’s article implied, asked for it. This sort of rape is less a criminal act than, claimed Stepp, “a consequence of today’s hookup culture” in which “lots of partying and flirting, plenty of alcohol, and ironically, the idea that women can be just as bold and adventurous about sex as men are” makes some instances of unwanted sexual contact “even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what.”
Date rape—confusing? In Stepp’s view, apparently so. We live in muddled times, she lamented. In days of yore, when “social rules were clearer,” rape was a simpler concept. Gender roles were satisfied, as men sought sex and women dodged and parried in the classic relationship dance. Now we no longer adhere to such boundaries. Many women “feel it’s perfectly okay to go out looking for a hookup or to be the aggressor, which may turn out fine for them—unless the signals get mixed or misread.” In these cases, Stepp claims, gray rape is often a possibility, and it’s much easier in such situations for an assaulted woman to blame herself.
Stepp’s article was torn to shreds by seething feminists in venues from Jezebel.com to the Huffington Post, but the damage had been done. Gray rape, with all of its troubling implications and true-blue vintage ignorance (hadn’t we heard this “she asked for it” routine before?), had entered the popular lexicon. Women who engaged in such apparently high-risk behaviors as drinking, dancing, and flirting—a demographic that encompassed the vast majority of female college students—were made to wonder if they were somehow at fault. Those women who had experienced date rape were told in no uncertain terms that the traumatic nature of the crime was somehow lessened. At Columbia, a university attended by fiercely independent and politically active students and located in a vibrant city where socializing with strangers is the norm, the issue took on an even graver significance. What did gray rape mean on campus?
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At the time the article was printed, Lauren, a member of the Columbia College class of 2011 whose name has been changed at her request, was just arriving on campus. She spent the first three weeks of September in the usual first-year pursuits: orientation, parties, adjusting to the college schedule. Since her first day on campus, she’d been hearing about one particular party. Hosted by one of the more socially active fraternities, in which she’d already made several friends, it was supposed to be the biggest party of the year.
She entered the party with two friends, both female, as the male students she’d come with hadn’t been allowed in. The three women started drinking a lemonade drink prepared in massive batches by the frat brothers. “I still have no idea how much alcohol I actually consumed,” Lauren recalls, but she knows she was drunk: her memory of the party is somewhat patchy, and she had to reconstruct the evening later by looking through her cell phone and observing the time stamps on text messages. About an hour after she arrived, she noticed a man wearing a suit and spoke to him briefly, asking why he was so dressed up. He told her that he had come from his internship, where he worked with one of the frat brothers, and that he was a Columbia senior.
Later that night, as Lauren stepped out of the bathroom, someone approached her from behind and began to dance with her. She quickly realized that it was the man in the suit that she’d spoken to earlier. When he spun her around, she noticed how drunk she was, but she let him kiss her. A few moments later he led her out of the party. Her friends, not knowing her well enough to realize this was out of character, didn’t stop her.
Lauren, the suited man, and his friend walked out of the frat house and onto 114th Street. “I’m not having sex with you tonight,” she cautioned, wanting to make herself clear. “That’s fine, that’s fine,” he responded, and hailed a cab for the three of them. Confused, Lauren asked him where his dorm was. “I live farther down,” he answered, elaborating that he lived off-campus with his half-brother in an apartment paid for by their mother.
They arrived at the apartment and went upstairs. Lauren began to feel ill at ease. Not only did his story seem odd—the apartment was far too luxurious for a college student—but she had just realized that she’d left everything but her CUID and cell phone at the party. New to the city, she had no idea where she was and no money for the subway or a cab. After an uncomfortable hour in which he kept trying to press drinks on her, she ended up following him back to his room.
The two made out for a while. He kept trying to take her pants off, but she kept refusing. “There were at least three or four times of me freaking out and being like, ‘This isn’t okay, I don’t want to have sex,’” Lauren says. Every time this would happen, he’d pull back and ask if she wanted to go back to campus. She’d say yes. He’d agree, then start to kiss her again and try to take her clothing off.
Finally, he asked her to watch while he masturbated. She agreed. At that point, she says, she was thinking, “I’m not getting out of here if he doesn’t come.” She didn’t like what was happening, but she didn’t feel that she would be able to leave. After a few minutes, he moved her hand to touch him. “Then,” she says, “he rolled me over and took my pants off and started to go at it. I kept saying no.”
After a few minutes, he stopped and asked her why she was saying no. “At that point my primary concern was the fact that he wasn’t wearing a condom,” Lauren says. “He was going to have sex with me whether I liked it or not ... and he had a brother waiting outside as far as I knew, and whatever happened with him would have been worse with two guys. So I said, you don’t have a condom. So he went and got one. And he raped me. He asked me during if I was okay, because I was crying.”
Afterward, Lauren went to the bathroom and got dressed as quickly as she could. She looked out the window and memorized landmarks, “so that if I decided to press charges I would know where he lived,” she explains. He walked her outside. She was still crying as he hailed her a cab, handed her money, and asked for her number. Lauren agreed to give it to him so that she could get away as soon as possible.
The next day, he called her and asked her out for coffee. She agreed. “I had to make sure he didn’t disappear,” she says. “Because he couldn’t get in trouble if he disappeared.” At some point during that day, she spoke to the frat member her rapist had identified as his coworker and learned that he wasn’t a college senior. Instead, he was in his late twenties, an investment banker at the same company where the frat brother who’d brought him was interning.
That evening, he met her for coffee at Nussbaum & Wu. She grilled him: “I asked if he’d realized I was crying, and he said no. And I asked if he’d realized it wasn’t a good idea, and he said he’d thought I was into him too and he didn’t realize how drunk I was.” Lauren didn’t believe him. “I don’t think he would call it rape,” she says, “but I think he knows I didn’t want to have sex with him.” To her, there was nothing gray about it—it was rape.
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The people Lauren has told about the rape have expressed less clear-cut views. One man, upon hearing the story, asked her what position it was, explaining that “it couldn’t have been rape” if she’d been on top. Others, like a few members of the frat that she tried to approach, “blew me off,” she says. “People have straight up said that it wasn’t rape.”
Such attitudes are familiar to Linnea Hincks and Kabita Parajuli, both CC ’10 and the co-coordinators of Take Back the Night, which is perhaps the most well-known antiviolence organization on Columbia’s campus. Hincks, who is also a certified peer counselor in the Rape Crisis and Anti-Violence Support Center, has had the opportunity to speak to a number of students about what defines rape. Many of these discussions have been positive, but there have also been “some pretty troubling conversations,” she says. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are very suspicious of the way we define consent, who think, especially when there’s alcohol involved, that the way we define consent doesn’t really work. Because if the perpetrator is drunk, how can he or she perceive consent?” In Hincks’ experience, many students simply don’t know how to think about rapes in which alcohol is a factor—which is problematic, as many of the rapes that occur on college campuses fall into that category.
A great deal of this confusion can be ascribed to the popularization of concepts like gray rape. To Parajuli, phrases like this are nothing but attempts to deny the severity of the problem. “I find it very puzzling,” she says, “that there are so many people who try and, not simply walk away from violence, but cover it up with words that make it seem almost acceptable.”
Hincks agrees. “It’s a way to remove blame from the perpetrator, and put it on the survivor. Because, you know, if it was a gray rape, she must have made it gray by something she did,” she says. “That’s not my understanding of consent at all.”
Many survivors of so-called gray rapes experience the reactions that Hincks describes and that Lauren went through. Unsure of how serious the problem is, people try to justify what happened by explaining it away. “Can it have been rape if both parties were drinking?” they wonder. Can silence be misinterpreted as consent? If you go home with somebody, don’t they have a right to expect something?
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Most people have been taught to think of rape as a man attacking a woman in a dark alley. There is no alcohol, there is no shared cab ride, there is no gray area, and there is certainly no possibility of the gender roles being shifted or reversed.
The idea of men as survivors is still new to many college students and is even treated as a joke. As the co-president of Columbia Men Against Violence, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, SEAS ’08, has often encountered this problem. While he’s quick to admit that men are assaulted with far less frequency than women are, he’s found that male survivors face certain challenges that women don’t. “There’s definitely an added stigma of being a male who’s been assaulted and coming out in a college community,” he says. “The overarching, unsaid philosophy is that men can’t be assaulted or that men should be strong.” Men who try to talk about their experiences are often mocked or not taken seriously, which, according to Bergson-Shilcock, “adds a lot of extra baggage and barriers to men being able to talk about this openly.” The societal stigma attached to being male and being raped means that proportionately far fewer men come forward with stories of sexual assault than do women. Despite Columbia’s aggressive consent campaigns, the idea that a man might say and mean no is still foreign to many students.
Joseph Kaptur, SEAS ’08, a member of CMAV and the director of Nightline in 2007, also feels that male survivors are scrutinized more closely and taken less seriously than their female counterparts. “As CMAV’s statement at TBTN said, male survivors have in many ways an even more difficult time of it than female survivors,” he says. “They are told, ‘What happened to you isn’t real. It doesn’t happen.’ It’s the subject of a joke because it’s just so far removed from a ‘normal’ experience.” He brings up a YouTube video called “Bro Rape” as an example. In this eight-minute mockumentary from popular Web site Derrickcomedy.com, a fake investigative report is launched into the phenomenon of men raping other men, never missing an opportunity to make light of the issue and mimic the phrases and concerns common to serious discussions of rape. Kaptur is sure the video was meant in fun, but the implicit statement—that any man who claims to have been sexually assaulted is either joking or lying—disturbs him deeply.
Columbia’s antiviolence campaign has certainly taken steps toward broader, less exclusive understandings of rape and consent. This year marked the first time that men were allowed to participate in the TBTN march in its entirety. In previous years, the march had begun with only women, while CMAV held a discussion group for men. Last year, there were more than 50 men at that discussion group, leaving them time only for introductions before they had to join the march. This year, TBTN came to a consensus—they would limit the front of the march to those who identified as women, but they would allow men to march the entire time. According to Hincks and Parajuli, the reasons for this decision were varied, but one of the strongest arguments for including men was TBTN’s desire to provide a safe space for all survivors. “As more statistics emerge and as people speak more openly about their experiences, it becomes quite obvious that it’s both men and women who are survivors,” Parajuli explains. “If we do want to take this to the next step and allow allies to walk with us, then we needed to include men.”
Kaptur was thrilled by TBTN’s decision to try including men in the march. “Having men included in every aspect of the march makes so much sense, because men are every bit as much survivors of sexual assault as women,” he says. “On the other hand, it completely makes sense to me that symbolically and physically it would be a women-led event due to the gendered nature of rape.” Still, he feels that Columbia’s resources for survivors have a long way to go. “At the Rape Crisis Center, they don’t allow men to be counselors,” he says. Despite its recent experiments with gender integration, others have raised similar concerns about TBTN. It purports to be a “safe space,” or a supportive place for survivors, but when male survivors still aren’t allowed to join their female counterparts in the front of the march, TBTN might not feel safe for everyone.
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“Safe space,” a term usually reserved for therapeutic settings, has a different connotation when it comes to Frat Row. Most of the larger, more stereotypically collegiate parties on campus take place in the brownstones on 114th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam that house many of the fraternities on campus. As such, the fraternities are under a great deal of pressure, and they often take the rap for the binge drinking and drug use that take place at such gatherings. Even worse, much of the blame for on-campus violence is placed on the Greek system.
Matt Heiman, CC ’09, bears the brunt of this as the president of the InterGreek Council—an organization that, according to its Columbia Web page, “provides guidelines and support” to the Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Council, and the Multicultural Greek Council. In his time as IGC’s president and, last year, as its judicial chair, he’s certainly dealt with “perceptions of fraternities on campus in terms of disciplinary issues,” he says. “But none of the issues—thus far, at least—that have been brought to me have dealt with the subject of rape or anything like that.” Instead, they’ve been issues of registering parties or of improper alcohol use. The IGC and the individual chapters within it have been continually working to improve their alcohol education system and to encourage responsible behavior, but they’re not under fire for sexual assault policies. “We are aware that it’s a problem on college campuses,” Heiman says. “We do want to fight it.” To that end, IGC has shown support for TBTN, encouraging its members to cheer the march on and hang banners out of the brownstones’ windows. It even holds a banner-making event to guarantee that fraternities don’t forget.
The interactions between fraternities and antiviolence groups have been nothing if not amiable. “We definitely work with people who are very responsive to supporting TBTN” from within the Greek system, Hincks says. “We’re very happy that those people exist.”
Bergson-Shilcock and CMAV agree. “The relationship has actually been pretty positive,” he says, citing the traditional banners and the consistency of that message.
Although her assailant was invited on campus by a frat brother who didn’t stop him from lying about his age and standing as a student, Lauren bears no ill will toward the Greek system. Many of the frat brothers she spoke to after being raped were supportive. One even pulled her aside when he saw her in a bar with an older friend, to tell her that if she needed a safe out, he could provide it. “I was so grateful that he was willing to do that,” she says. “I thanked him, profusely, repeatedly.” He knew what had happened to her, and he was willing to go out of his way to ensure, as best he could, that a similar thing didn’t happen again.
Still, she can’t help but feel that the problem of assault necessarily looms larger in the fraternity party scene. Over the months, she’s been told a number of horror stories about that particular fraternity. “I’d heard many, many times that this was ‘the date rape frat,’” she says. When she went to a sexual assault counselor on campus and told her story, mentioning the frat at which the party occurred, the counselor told her: “They have that reputation for a reason. I’ve heard this a lot about them. This isn’t an isolated incident.”
Hearing this from a counselor who surely had insider’s knowledge into the truth about sexual assault on campus, Lauren was shocked. She had many friends in the Greek system and knew them all to be decent, moral guys. None of them believed that fraternities deserved their reputation for date rape. She spoke to one member of the fraternity in question who vehemently denied the rumors. “I think he had literally never heard anything which he had identified as rape,” she says. Otherwise, he and the other brothers she knows would have been horrified.
The problem with the frats, suggests Bergson-Shilcock, is a problem with every venue on campus. “Rape happens everywhere,” he explains. “Rape happens in the frats, but it also happens in the dorms. It happens all over the place. It’s not that they’re exempt from it, but unfortunately, it’s pervasive.” The problem is widespread, at least partly on account of a glaring disconnect between what’s mentioned in confidence and what’s on record. Heiman and the rest of the fraternity leadership think they’re doing everything they need to do, but stigma and a feeling of helplessness ensure that survivors, counselors, and friends who know the amount of work left to be done aren’t talking.
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Helen Arnold, the manager of Columbia’s Disciplinary Procedure for Sexual Assault, is familiar with the dilemma. “Sexual assault occurs more than it is reported,” she says. “It is the most unreported crime on campus.” It’s a common tragedy: shame about the incident, fear of attracting attention and anger, and the desire to go on with life as best one can all tempt survivors to let rape go unreported.
For students afraid to come forward with their stories, the University’s policy is often much more appealing than the criminal justice system’s. “The benefit of doing it through the University,” Hincks explains, “is that we use a definition of consent that is a lot more inclusive and encompassing than the criminal justice system’s. I’d say the University has a more progressive line and would accept things as rape in a way that the DA wouldn’t. Basically, at the DA’s office, if they don’t think they can win a case, they won’t pursue it and it ends there, whereas at most schools at Columbia, if you file a complaint, there will be a panel, there will be a hearing, much less formal and intimidating than in the criminal justice system.”
Despite the accessibility of Columbia’s policy, TBTN leaders and others on campus see a major flaw in the University’s inability to pursue justice outside of Columbia’s gates. “It might be legitimate to have actual criminal repercussions for violent acts,” Hincks says. Parajuli agrees, “I don’t really understand why the University doesn’t pursue legal action.” Both are frustrated by the apparently impenetrable gap between University and criminal justice.
The disciplinary system is a bit complex: as Arnold details, “if the student named in a complaint is in either CC or SEAS, the DPSA is the only internal reporting option available to the complainant,” whereas if the student named is in JTS, UTS, or the Law School, complainants must go through their Dean’s Discipline. If the accused student is in any of Columbia’s other schools, the complainant can choose the method he or she prefers. Earlier this year, Dean of Student Affairs Chris Colombo created a committee to examine and reevaluate the Dean’s Discipline process, which indicates that the flaws many students have pointed to in the policy over the years might soon be corrected, though the case will still never be taken to the DA.
Regardless of whether the action goes through the DPSA or through Dean’s Discipline, though, there’s a certain sense of support and community within a University that’s lacking in the larger criminal justice system. It seems, so far, that the University’s determination to see allegations of rape through has been successful in terms of reported crime. Arnold says that, over the past few years, “more students have been accessing the DPSA Office to file complaints alleging sexual assault.” Still, there are many survivors who never report the rapes and never pursue disciplinary action, within a college system or otherwise.
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Lauren is one of these survivors. At first, she’d intended to go to the University with her story. But when she found out that her rapist wasn’t a Columbia student and realized her options were limited to the criminal justice system, she felt discouraged and decided not to have a rape kit done. She didn’t know how she could prove that she hadn’t consented, and she was afraid that the DA would throw her case out. “As much as I wanted something to happen,” she says, “as much as I wanted him to know that he was a rapist, the disempowerment of being raped would only be multiplied if I went in and had pressed charges and got told by the DA that I didn’t have a case.” She knew she’d feel even worse “if he interpreted that as, ‘See? She tried to press charges against me, but it didn’t work and thus I’m not a rapist.’” Now, she regrets her decision. She wishes that she had some way of proving explicitly to him that what he did was rape.
It’s been nearly eight months, but Lauren is still grappling with the enormity of what happened to her. “I still obsess over it,” she says. “There are days when I don’t think about much else. ... Until about reading week, I wasn’t okay with being alone for very long. I thought about nothing else when I was alone.”
Friends, boyfriends, family members, and therapists have all been there for her. They’ve reassured her that she’s not at fault, that what happened to her wasn’t her choice. She feels better when she realizes that her story has changed the way others understand what is and isn’t consent and when that awareness manifests itself in action. When a fraternity brother goes out of his way to make sure she feels safe in a bar or when a boyfriend is careful not to push her sexually, she knows she’s been heard. “If telling the story could make an impact,” she says, “if I could expand it beyond just me, then maybe a little good was done in the world.” \\\