Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series examining sexual abuse toward women at Dartmouth.
A female friend of Thiago Oliveira '06 visited Dartmouth for one weekend and left the campus a victim of sexual assault.
"I had close friends from home who were sexually assaulted, friends on campus during freshman year who were sexually assaulted ... [but this incident] just shoved in my face how vulnerable women can be in male-dominated spaces on campus," Oliveira, who has since been trained as a Sexual Abuse Peer Advisor, said.
Dean of the College Jim Larimore estimated 50 or more completed rapes on campus per year. His approximation is less than half of the actual number, according to statistics of reported cases and percentage of cases that go unreported.
A perhaps fairer estimate is 109 completed rapes per year at Dartmouth, a number that was considered accurate by the Coordinator of the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program Leah Prescott.
Director of counseling and health resources Mark Reed believed that this number underrepresented the actual occurrences of rape on campus. According to Reed, one out of every four college women will experience sexual assault on campus before they graduate.
"I believe that there are sexual assaults every week on this campus," Reed said.
About twenty-two percent of women raped are between 18 and 24, according to the Rape Treatment Center [RTC] at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, making college-aged women particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual assault. Women in college from that age group face an even greater risk of rape and sexual assault.
According to "The Sexual Victimization of College Women" released by the National Institute of Justice, the perpetual contact between female and male students on a campus put college women at a greater risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault when compared to other women in this age group and to the population as a whole.
In 2004, Safety and Security reported eight incidents of rape on campus, a number notably higher than the other Ivy League schools with undergraduate enrollment similar in size to Dartmouth. Princeton and Yale reported three and four sexual offenses, respectively, in 2004.
For many students, it is hard to relate to these numbers given Dartmouth's tight-knit community.
"People stereotype assault as a man jumping out of woods that you don't know," sexual abuse peer advisor Libby Hadzima '06 said.
In fact, according to the victimization study, 90 percent of women raped or assaulted on campus know their offenders. Of all completed rapes, 35.5 percent of perpetrators were a classmate of the victim, 34.2 percent were a friend, 27.7 percent were a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend and 2.6 percent were an acquaintance.
The majority of rapes on campus took place after midnight, according to the victimization study. Although this is a time when Dartmouth students can be found in Greek houses, most people who spoke with The Dartmouth about sexual assault dissociated the Greek system as a factor contributing to sexual assault.
"At the end of the day, what it really boils down to is respect for other people, and the [fraternity-based social scene] is not one that requires disrespecting other people. ... It's not the space creating the problem; it's the personal decisions by people in the space creating the problem," Oliveira said.
What cannot be negated, however, is the relationship between sexual assault and alcohol, to which Reed refers as "the most commonly used rape drug."
Alcohol is involved in the majority of sexual assault cases, according to the RTC, on the part of the victim, assailant or both. In the victimization study, a female student who frequently drank enough to get drunk increased her risk of victimization. Director of Safety and Security and College Proctor Harry Kinne confirmed that many incidences of reported sexual assault are alcohol-related.
"I would never want to imply that alcohol is a mitigating factor. Whoever is a victim of sexual assault has had no responsibility in that sexual assault; it's the perpetrator," Kinne said.
Reed also acknowledged alcohol as playing a role in sexual assault.
"The students have teased me from time to time, saying, 'Well, if there was zero alcohol, there would be a whole lot less sex," Reed said.
This generalization reflects a misunderstanding about what constitutes sexual abuse. What was repeated often by those who spoke with The Dartmouth, as well as is explicitly stated in the Student Handbook, is that consent cannot be given when a victim is incapacitated because of alcohol or another drug.
"The most frightening part is that some offenders don't know what consent is, and that's a really important message to get across to all people," SAPA intern Aya Caldwell '06 said. "I think there needs to be more dialogue. There are cases when people don't know what consent is, and it gets clouded when alcohol is involved. It really needs to be defined."
Many students, victims and perpetrators alike, lack the knowledge about sexual abuse that can help them make better decisions. Of the college women who had been victims of rape in the victimization study, only 46.5 percent considered the action rape, while 48.8 percent did not, and 4.7 percent were unsure. According to Oliveira, perpetrators are often aware of their actions, but they don't understand that what they're doing is wrong.
"Often when [the perpetrators] go into court, you can get them to describe what they did without a problem because they'll describe it as a logical and appropriate thing to do," Oliveira said.
Reed is less forgiving, however. Citing a presentation given on campus last year by researcher David Lisak, Reed said that most perpetrators know exactly what they are doing when they commit sexual assault.
"We all like to think that [the perpetrator] misunderstood," Reed said. "That's not the common case; that's the rare case. Usually it's someone who is doing this over and over again."
