Thwarting sexual assaults on campus
Penn State University sends out text alerts to warn students against sex-pest red zones
TRAINING programmes around the US are trying to teach bystanders to stop sexual assault, and now is when they have to be especially alert. Campus sexual assault reports are so common at the beginning of the autumn semester, that college administrators call this time of year the “red zone”.
Penn State University sends campus-wide text alerts when someone has been sexually assaulted.
During the last academic year, there were 29 campus text alerts about sexual assaults at the university’s main campus, and half of them were issued in the first 10 weeks of classes.
“Maybe that’s why you showed up today,” said Katie Tenny, as she ran a rape-prevention training session at the school earlier this year. “Maybe you’re tired of the text alerts, knowing that this is happening to people around you.”
Tenny is the leader of a programme that seeks to teach people to do or say something to prevent a potential attack. It’s one of the hundreds of bystander intervention programmes that have sprung up in recent years at universities, high schools and military bases in the US, designed to involve whole communities in discouraging harassment and sexual assault.
Momentum for this good bystander movement has been building for several years, aided by some widely reported stories of heroic interventions. Though research is still evolving, studies so far suggest it is helping.
But now some assault victims and their advocates fear new obstacles, including a recent announcement by the US Department of Education that it would jettison rules that had pushed colleges and universities to be more aggressive about sexual assaults.
A bystander is present in about 30% of cases of rape, threat of rape or unwanted sexual contact, according to an Associated Press analysis of 24 years of data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimisation Survey. In just over onethird of those cases the actions of the bystanders helped, often by scaring off the assailant in some way.
That happened last summer in Gainesville, Florida, when two bouncers at a club, one a linebacker at the University of Florida named Cristian Garcia, intervened when they found a man raping a woman in an alley behind the bar.
The 19-year-old woman was extremely intoxicated, but said she did not know the man and had tried to push him away. Christopher Lee Shaw, 34, was later convicted of sexual battery and sentenced to five years in prison.
Another widely-reported example occurred at Stanford University in January 2015, when two Swedish graduate students came across a man on top of an unconscious woman late one night behind a campus dumpster.
Deciding something looked strange, the men, Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, got off their bikes and walked over. Jonsson shouted at the man: “What are you doing?” Arndt recalled.
The man fled. Jonsson tackled him and Arndt, who is over 1.8m tall and weighs 96kg, sat on his legs to help pin him down until the police arrived.
At the sentencing of the assailant, Brock Turner, the victim, who was not identified, read a letter in court that praised Arndt and Jonsson. “I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another,” she said.
Still, experts note many people may choose not to intervene in these kinds of situations, especially if they aren’t over 1.8m like Arndt, or play college football, like Garcia.
Even Arndt noted they decided to intervene while on a familiar path at a college campus they considered friendly and safe. It’s possible he might have hesitated to act if it had happened in a strange neighbourhood, he said.
In a large national survey of students at more than two dozen US college campuses in 2015, 20% said they’d seen someone acting in a sexually violent or harassing manner, but most of them said they did nothing. When asked why not, about a quarter said they didn’t know what they could do.
A programme called Green Dot, founded at the University of Kentucky about 10 years ago, teaches student leaders and others to identify potential sexual assaults and safely intervene to prevent them. The programme has spread to hundreds of campuses, including Penn State, which calls its year-and-a-half-old Green Dot programme “Stand for State”.
Tenny says there are a number of sometimes simple things people can do, like starting a conversation with a potential victim or getting a friend to intervene.