A RAPE CULTURE?
They are all disturbing cases. Three different Canadian universities, in different regions of the country. Episodes of male sexual aggression, and beyond that, an alleged assault. And three similar responses from the schools’ leaders, identifying each campus with “rape culture.”
Coined some four decades ago, the term was not widely used. But it’s now bandied about on campuses across North America, and the implication is startling, if unintended: Despite decades of sexual politics, heightened awareness and warnings, prosecution, feminist instruction and activism, our institutions of higher learning are misogynistic traps. They are corrupted, dangerous environments for students, visitors and staff.
Are things really as bad as all that? At some schools where “rape culture” has purportedly spread, leaders have failed to define the term, much less identify its traits.
Does it even exist? Not every one is convinced. Few in academia are willing to speak out, and perhaps none as boldly as Miles Groth, a professor of psychology with an interest in men’s studies and health at tiny Wagner College, on Staten Island, N.Y. “There isn’t a rape culture on our campuses,” Prof. Groth insists, knowing such a statement may cause controversy.
He’s used to that. “The term ‘ rape culture’ is unnecessarily hyperbolic. It’s meant to arouse strong feelings in people,” he says, “and it does a disservice to the issue of sexual aggression on campus as a whole.”
Prof. Groth visited Canada and spoke on such matters last year, before the events in question became part of a larger story. Allegations of assault involving University of Ottawa male hockey team members and a female victim are the most recent. The university responded Monday, suspending the entire team from league play while police investigate. Weeks earlier at the same institution, a student union leader was made the subject of vile, sexually explicit Facebook messages shared by male students.
On Thursday, U of O president Allan Rock, and chancellor Michaëlle Jean, Canada’s former governor general, announced the creation of a task force on “respect and equality.” At their press conference, Ms. Jean described “rape culture” on campus, as if it was common discourse. “We think the disease needs to be curbed, and then cured,” said Ms. Jean.
At Saint Mary’s University (SMU) in Halifax last semester, a frosh-week “rape chant” attracted media coverage and led to a president’s council report, which came out in December. “The Saint Mary’s rape chant is one manifestation of what the council discusses as rape culture,” reads the report.
A version of the same rape chant was heard in September, on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver. Reported by the campus newspaper, The Ubyssey, and confirmed by UBC staff, the chant was described in an initial fact-finding report as “inappropriate.” Recited during frosh week by first year business school students, the rape chant is certainly awful. It goes like this:
“At UBC we like ‘ em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.”
A second student-led chant, this one insulting to aboriginals, was also heard on campus: “Pocah, Pocah, Pocah, Pocahontas, white man took our land, sacrifice [family name of group leader representing John Smith in the skit], Pocahontas, ass, ass, ass.”
Media reports about the two incidents led to another, more assertive reaction by UBC, and to the formation of a president’s task force on gender-based violence and aboriginal stereotypes. The task force delivered a 23-page report with draft recommendations three weeks ago, titled “Transforming UBC and developing a culture of equality and accountability: Confronting rape culture and colonialist violence.”
Unlike the events that preceded it, the task force report received scant attention off- campus. It’s a curious, almost inscrutable document, prepared by a 12-member team of UBC professors, other staff, an alumnus and a student representative.
After suggesting in its title that UBC has a “rape culture” that must be confronted, the report fails to identify or even define the purported phenomenon. It does not attribute “rape culture” to any of the incidents leading to the task force’s formation and mandate. Indeed, the term “rape culture” is mentioned in passing, just twice, and in two footnotes.
In other words, UBC’s “rape culture” is essentially ignored in the very report tasked with “confronting” it; rooting out such a surreptitious disease will be difficult.
(Among the report’s 14 draft recommendations, now under consideration, is a mandatory new “culture of equality course” that would “include a coherent cross-list of all existing courses that deal substantively with intersectional gender-based violence and aboriginal peoples,” and an effort to have “all existing courses” at UBC include material “relevant to gender/gender identity, indigeneity race/ethnicity, and sexuality.”)
Over at SMU, the president’s council report gives its selfavowed “rape culture” short shrift as well. The report refers to a 1996 paper by anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, and her “key elements for a ‘rape supportive culture.’ ” These include “sex segregation, tolerance for violence, and male dominance, all of which are common characteristics of male varsity sports teams.”
The SMU report ends by recommending “mandatory university-wide programming during Orientation Week to educate around issues of consent, homophobia, transphobia, racism, colonialism, ableism and other oppressive frameworks that marginalized students and community members face daily.”
It also recommends “training on rape culture, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, mental illness, indigenous issues and other oppressive frameworks for all SMU faculty, staff and administration.”
Prof. Groth says forcing all members of a college community to undergo such training, and painting all male students as potential aggressors, have negative consequences. They are causing “a crisis of enrolment” in some U.S. colleges, he maintains, and fears the same may be true in Canada. “Our colleges are haemorrhaging male students,” says Prof. Groth. Meanwhile, in the U.S., at least, “the statistics are clear. Incidents of rape have been falling for decades.”
The picture is not as sharp in Canada, where rape and sexual assault statistics are not broken down. Many feminist organizations and female support networks refer to loosely sourced data, some of which is simply inaccurate or distorted.
Search the Internet for “rape culture” on Canadian campuses, for example, and numerous descriptions and “rape facts” documents pop up, citing a passage from a 2000 book called Body Wars, by Connecticut-based clinical psychologist Margo Maine.
“In one study, over half of high school boys, and nearly half of the girls stated that rape was acceptable if the male was sexually aroused!” writes Ms. Maine, in the oftquoted passage. “Eight per cent of college men have either attempted or successfully raped. Thirty per cent say they would rape if they could get away with it. When the wording was changed to ‘force a woman to have sex,’ the number jumped to 58%. Worse still, 83.5% argue that ‘some women look like they are just asking to be raped.’ ”
Reached in Connecticut this week, Ms. Maine acknowledged she does not know the original source of her numbers. She said she pulled some of the figures from another author’s book, published in 1988. “I don’t know if I had additional citations that somehow were dropped in production and I failed to notice at the time, or if I had another secondary source,” Ms. Maine wrote in an email to the National
Post on Friday. “This is not something I can fully address right now, due to the urgent commitments of my clinical work as well as my other professional activities.”
The “one study” to which she refers in her book, and which is promulgated by so many others, simply does not exist. Worse, says the scholar responsible for some of the data which are mentioned, the
Body Wars passage misrepresents his work.
University of California, Los Angeles, professor Neil Malamuth teaches and researches topics related to men’s acceptance of violence against women. In an interview Friday, he said he doesn’t conduct work with high school students, and cannot recall any study that indicates “over half of high school boys, and nearly half of the girls stated that rape was acceptable if the male was sexually aroused.”
Nor does he recall any study in which 83.5% of men “argue that ‘ some women look like they are just asking to be raped.’ ”
“That doesn’t sound right,” said Prof. Malamuth.
He did conduct studies with some college men almost 30 years ago, reporting that 8% of his subjects indicated that they “had either attempted or successfully raped.” That is a very troubling finding; however, it does not mean that 8% of all university men rape.
It’s also misleading to claim that 30% of college men “say they would rape if they could get away with it,” says Prof. Malamuth, or that “when the wording was changed to ‘force a woman to have sex,’ the number jumped to 58%.’ ” That’s not what his studies found. He says that unfortunately, “sometimes people oversimplify. Sometimes they distort.”
And sometimes they regurgitate inaccuracies and loaded phrases, passing them off as truths, twisting situations that call for attention and careful guidance into tangled messes that are bound to become worse.