Sex assault during college is common, life-altering
EAST LANSING, Michigan: She remembers doing shots of liquor in her dorm room before heading out to a football tailgate party, where she got blackout drunk. When she came to, she was groggy, standing in the bathroom of her dorm room, looking in the mirror. Her hair was a mess. Behind her was a man she didn’t recognise, staring back at her and then slipping out the door.
It was just a few weeks into her freshman year at Michigan State University, and Rachel Sienkowski had become a survivor — but of what, she wasn’t sure. A sexual assault? A rape?
All she knew was that her head was bleeding. Blood had spattered the ceiling of her bedroom and stained her bed sheets, her pillows, her zebrastriped comforter. She was crying.
“I was very confused,” Sienkowski says now, nearly three years later. “I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was or how I got there or how long I had been there.”
Sienkowski’s story, and her confusion about what happened to her on that boozy football Saturday, echo the descriptions many women and men gave of their sexual assaults during their time in college.
After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.
Their personal accounts portray college as a world where unwelcome sexual experiences, ranging from fondling to rape, are so commonplace that they are almost mundane. Like Sienkowski, many victims said they were assaulted soon after they arrived on campus, as they embraced newfound freedoms, and many of them had been so drunk that they couldn’t remember much, if anything, of what happened.
Yet however gauzy their memories, they knew they had been violated. Many survivors described their experiences as scars that stayed with them for months or years, often seeding anxiety that interfered with academics and relationships.
Other survivors’ stories — including about groping, coerced sex and rape within long-term relationships — illuminate the dizzying breadth of experiences that make it impossible to generalise about sexual misconduct in college.
A student at California’s University of La Verne, a devout Muslim who was a virgin and had never had alcohol, said she didn’t recognise a sexual advance until it was too late.
A University of Connecticut student said she told her boyfriend she wasn’t ready for sex, only to wake up from a deep sleep to discover he was raping her.
A
woman
at
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public university in the Midwest said she pretended to be asleep as her roommate’s friend, a man staying overnight, touched her lips, her arm, her face. He didn’t stop until morning.
“It was seven hours of hell,” she said.
Many female victims blamed a pervasive lack of respect for women and a culture of expected sex. The majority never reported their assaults to their colleges or to police, meaning that their stories don’t show up in crime statistics and have never been investigated.
Some said they didn’t report the attacks because they wrestled with hidden guilt, feeling partly to blame for the crimes committed against them as they grappled with the aftermath.
A student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan said she was raped in the shower after a day of drinking at a house on the lake. A stranger forced his way into the locked bathroom and then joined her in the running water. She said “no” but feared she should have done more. She never reported the attack.
“I could have screamed, I could have yelled for help, or hit him or scratched him or something,” the student said. “I don’t feel like I did enough to prevent it.”
Sienkowski probably wouldn’t have chosen to go to police if not for the gash in the back of her head, she said. Her friends were alarmed when she walked into their room, bleeding and clad only in a bra and gym shorts. They alerted the dorm’s resident assistant, who called Michigan State University police.
Sienkowski went to the hospital, where doctors stapled her wound shut and completed a rape kit, according to police records. The examination showed signs of sexual intercourse but couldn’t determine whether it had been consensual. Because Sienkowski remembered so little, police conducted multiple interviews with her friends and other witnesses to piece it together.
She and her roommate had started drinking that afternoon with shots of Bacardi rum in their doom room.
Then she headed outside to the campus tailgate frenzy, an all-day party before Michigan State faced off against the University of Notre Dame at 8pm. It was a sunny Saturday in mid-September, and lawns near the stadium were crowded with thousands of people anticipating the matchup of two national powerhouses.
Sienkowski and her cousin each had a beer and a shot at a tailgate tent near the tennis courts. Then Sienkowski headed off to Spartan Stadium for the game. She never made it.
Sometime that evening, she met a man at a tailgate party, police records say.
In interviews with campus police officers, the man described an evening of drunken consensual sex — one he said he regretted, because he had a girlfriend. And, like Sienkowski, he said he was too drunk to remember much. — WPBloomberg
After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.