I honestly don't care if N. Alex Tonelli '06 reads my rebuttal to his recent op-ed ("Fortnight in Review," May 9), but I do genuinely hope that everyone else who read his column does. There were so many factual and contextual errors and misconceptions and outright insults in the editorial concerning the female community on this campus, and the rest of the world in general, that something must be said.
Obviously, Tonelli has no idea about the fear and pain that many women experience in life, especially in a male dominated scene such as Dartmouth. Dartmouth might be a safer place for women than say, Egypt (where female genital mutilation is still a common practice, even in "modern" hospitals), but no place should ever be considered safe enough when a woman has to carry a knife in order to feel comfortable walking along on a Saturday night. Nor is any place a very safe place where the woman is ignored or, even worse, blamed for being assaulted. This would be an exaggeration if I couldn't think of specific examples of each of these circumstances within the Dartmouth community.
There is a well-established statistic that one in seven college women will be raped before they graduate. This is just rape, not even including other forms of sexual assault such as forced sexual contact and sexual coercion. That means almost 100 women per class will be raped before they leave this campus. That is anything but safe. The abundance of victim and complicit male testimonies printed in campus publications and circulating oral evidence demonstrate even if the national statistics are not precise for every community, the problem is present, real, and significant here at Dartmouth.
So, assuming over 350 women in any four years will be in serious need of counseling and sexual abuse recovery assistance, and there was only one person to help all of them, this is just simply and ridiculously inadequate. Compare this to the 1,000 students who seek counseling at Dick's House with one of the 12 counselors on staff. That's an 83:1 student to counselor ratio, over four times that available to sexual assault victims. There is an acknowledged paucity of counseling on campus. There are one-quarter the available opportunities for counseling for victims of sexual assault. This can result in months of waiting during which psychological damage can become even more permanent.
One lie viciously perpetuated by Tonelli's column is the perception that sexual assault is the woman's fault. Calling women's issues such as rape education and awareness a plague is just wrong. Women's issues are not the plague; the plague is comprised of the situations and perceptions that foster environments where women are made to have such issues! The autonomy of the individual is one of the primary tenets of American culture. When this autonomy is forcefully, and often painfully, stolen from a woman (or man) it is easy to see how one's world could come crashing down about him or her. Can you imagine how Tonelli's words might have made some already self-doubting and hurt rape victim feel about herself, hearing her righteous complaints (if she even has the strength to say anything) called a plague on Tonelli's and his friends' good times? Even if certain attempts at rape education are poorly executed, like "Take Back the Night," this does not mean that their purpose is unfounded. It's one thing to attack the implementation of women's help programs, and it is quite another to attack the necessity of their existence.
As far as the efforts to combat sexual assault abroad are concerned, it's obvious Tonelli has been completely mistaken in their intent and execution. The purpose of these programs is to educate women before they go as to what they can expect and also give them some idea about what can possibly be done while abroad. Being a woman in a foreign country where you don't speak the language well, or sometimes at all, can be a very scary thing. Some kind of support is necessary before, during and after travel to prevent sexual assault and, also help heal the pain that can result from sexual assault and misconduct against women, and that is what these programs are trying to offer.
Making uneducated, oversimplified and downright nasty remarks about earnest attempts to really help people is not the way to attack perceived fiscal irresponsibility or ineffective programming. The reality of the victimization of women on this campus is not an issue to be debated -- it is a fact and if we can't realize that, we can't begin to make a difference with our available resources.
