Tuesday marked the second and third of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault’s public listening sessions. Responding to 2014 statistics that show one in five women will be raped during her college years, as well as “a substantial number of men,” and that only 12 percent of student victims report the assault to law enforcement, President Barack Obama commissioned an interagency task force charged with developing “a coordinated federal response to campus rape and sexual assault.”
Given 90 days from Jan. 22 to compose a set of recommendations for the president, the task force’s information-gathering is partially composed of 10 webinars. Students, survivors, university administrators, alumni, parents, law enforcement members, rape-crisis center staff and national experts are invited to connect via the Internet and make verbal comments or submit written ones.
For Ohio University, this will probably mean that sometime before Fall Semester, the federal government will issue a set of national best practices and encouraged policy changes that our university is encouraged, but not required, to make.
In many ways, this process is a little anticlimactic for those of us at this university. Although it’s noble that the White House has suddenly decided that college students need salvation from sexual violence rates that haven’t decreased in at least 20 years, we OU students are in a much better position to make sustainable changes on our campus than the federal government is.
We have taken the first step, breaking the silence about rape culture on our campus, but we have a long way to go toward undermining it completely. Still conspicuously absent from the discussion are the people with arguably the most direct authority over the university: our trustees. Apparently, our board is too busy guaranteeing permanent tuition hikes to focus on what news outlets have long referred to as an “epidemic” of campus sexual assault.
Next, we can put serious effort into something from the Survivor Advocacy Program, of which I am a member, called the “Bar Stamp” initiative, which rewards businesses whose bartenders have all taken bystander intervention courses. Over and over again, we’ve identified alcohol culture as a major part of our campus’ problem with rape culture, and bystander intervention training is demonstrated to be an effective community-prevention strategy against violence.
Finally, isn’t it about time that our sexual misconduct policy asked for verbal consent from both parties? The radical shift in dialogue on rape culture isn’t about understanding that “no” means no, but only that “yes” means yes.
We at OU come from a long history of being ahead of the progressive curve, graduating women and students of color long before the practices were standard. Our president participated in the Civil Rights movement protests, and our dean of students has taken considerable heat for her feminist tendencies. What campus is better positioned to make headlines this semester? Or to care about our students long before the White House says we have to?
Bekki Wyss is a junior studying English literature. What’s the best way to prevent sexual assault on college campuses? Email her your thoughts at rw225510@ohiou.edu.
