On Tuesday, May 4 at 2 a.m., Yeardley Love, a senior lacrosse player at UVA, was found dead, allegedly beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend, also a senior lacrosse player at the school. Everyone is wondering the same thing: "How could this happen in our community?" Many of us at Dartmouth are similarly wondering: how could this happen to two privileged kids attending a prominent university, who seemed to have everything going for them? How could this happen to two students who could easily have been Dartmouth students?
Recently on campus, the first annual Pride Theater Festival included The Laramie Project a play about the death of Matthew Shepard, a university student who was beaten to death 10 years ago because he was a homosexual. Many members of the community were shocked that this could happen in Laramie, their beloved small college town. The town's mantra was "live and let live," or, as a homosexual character in the play eloquently put it, "If I don't tell you I'm gay you won't kick the shit out of me." The community believed it had a progressive attitude toward the LGBTQ community, but it was anything but welcoming. Tolerance is very different from acceptance.
Though they occurred 10 years apart, on opposite sides of the country and for different reasons, the murders of Yeardley Love and Matthew Shepard are inherently connected. Both the alleged murderers claim the victims' deaths were unintentional. Both murders were products of subtle yet violent attitudes that the community complicity supported. These murders were not random acts of violence, but the product of attitudes that were taught and reinforced by the surrounding community.
The same attitudes are reinforced in our own community.
Many people on this campus believe we live in a small bubble. We do not. Sexual assault and relationship violence is a problem on every college campus, and this is true especially at Dartmouth. According to the Clery Act Report, Dartmouth had 22 reported cases of sexual assault in 2008, which was the highest number in the Ivy League. This number becomes more shocking when we consider that Dartmouth also has the lowest undergraduate population. Even given these statistics, the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported. Just because this is a small, tight-knit community doesn't mean assaults don't occur, particularly when alcohol is involved.
Some of us will go through Dartmouth never having realized this kind of violence, but none of us will go leave the College without encountering homophobic or misogynistic behaviors. These "seeds of violence," a term used by another character in The Laramie Project, are anything but harmless. You may roll your eyes at someone asking you not to use the term "fag," but my best friend was pushed against a wall and called a fag in a fraternity basement at Dartmouth. This violent term blatantly signals to members of the LGBTQ community that they are not welcome because of their sexuality. The same goes for the misogynistic actions of some members of our community. For example, singing the alma mater without the phrase "for the daughters of Dartmouth," as many do, says that women are unwelcome on this campus. It reinforces a power dynamic with which women on this campus are too familiar: a feeling of powerlessness that can make us feel unsafe.
These songs and words have meaning,and their implications can lead to violence. They condone and even celebrate a menacing attitude toward members of our community. Not including women in the alma mater makes women feel less respected by other members of this community, and therefore not entitled to the treatment accorded to fully respected members. If this is what the subtle yet prevalent attitude is on campus, there is nothing to stop tense situations from spiraling out of control.
And the perpetrators of these attitudes are not the only people responsible. The guy who pushed my friend doubtlessly used the word "fag" around his friends before, but was probably never told not to do so. If the members of this community continue to ignore these words and symbols, we allow these attitudes to exist, opening the door to the possibility of violence. It's only a step away from saying nothing when we witness a blacked-out peer being led out of a fraternity basement by someone whose clear intention is to hook up. We all become partly responsible for a crime when we do nothing.
I hope that we can learn from both the tragedy of Matthew Shepard and the tragedy of Yeardley Love. There are seeds of violence present in the homophobic slurs and the misogynistic traditions of this school, and though they are perhaps unintentional, these words and symbols represent an attitude toward the LGBTQ community and toward women that allows for violence. We have a responsibility to hold each other accountable for our attitudes and actions to ensure that this is a community of safety and respect. These tragedies happened because the warning signs were there, but were ignored. We must refuse to ignore the precursors to violence and act on prejudice when we see it, or we will have a tragedy on our own hands.
