“The Lawn” at University of Virginia. (Karen Blaha/Wikimedia Commons)
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The media loves to go into feeding frenzies with controversial topics — make one wrong move and you’re a target. Even when the target the media is chastising is, well, the media.
Late last month, Rolling Stone published a jaw-dropping story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA). The story centered around a girl named Jackie, who claimed that two years ago, she went with a date to a party at UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi house and was gang-raped by seven men. The reaction was uproarious, prompting protests at the fraternity house and the suspension of fraternities until January by UVA’s president. The problem is, Jackie’s account and the Rolling Stone’s reporting, had inconsistencies, the kind the media loves to jump on.
And jump they did. Hard-hitting reports by the Washington Post took the story apart, uncovering that Rolling Stone had failed to contact the alleged attackers and the fraternity itself during its reporting of Jackie’s story. Some of Jackie’s friends, who were also not contacted, said things happened differently. The Post, the New York Times and countless other outlets hopped on the criticism train, some in self-serving, look-at-the-failed-journalists-over-there ways. The Eric Wemple Blog at the Post seemed giddy to report “the full demise” of the story last week. But the people jumping on Rolling Stone are seriously missing the point, both about this story and about the larger college sexual assault issue it highlighted.
Rolling Stone messed up, but can you blame their team for being apprehensive toward contacting the fraternity members Jackie accused? Talking to the fraternity about the story puts Jackie in an incredibly vulnerable position — it risks defamation, alienation, and at worst, physical retaliation. When a source has gone through sexual abuse, your first job as a journalist is not to double-check the ethics of the whole business. Your first job is to make sure that you don’t make the situation worse.
Perhaps Rolling Stone should have scrapped the story or pushed Jackie to come to some sort of agreement on contacting the alleged rapists. But it should at least be understandable, especially to other reporters, that when someone confides in you with such a colossal and traumatic story, all things ethically journalistic aren’t exactly going to be at the front of your mind. Scrutiny naturally takes a backseat to the impulse to tell such a story, because at base, no matter what publication you work for, you’re human first, and a journalist second.
But let’s flip the script for a moment. Why would it make sense for a female college student at a well-respected, wealthy university rife with pro-fraternity sentiment to lie about being assaulted? What does a student gain by bringing up false charges other than the kind of scrutiny and social backlash that Jackie has endured so far?
It is true that there are problems with Jackie’s story; indeed, the man she identified to her friends as her date at the time did not even attend UVA, and most likely had no involvement with Jackie at all. But no matter the inconsistencies, it is clear that Jackie did experience some degree of sexual assault. We know that after that night, Jackie, according to her own story and her UVA suite-mate’s, became depressed and stayed huddled in her bed for the better part of a semester, sometimes not coming out for days at a time to the point where her academic dean had to contact her to intervene. Jackie’s suite-mate and the three friends later interviewed by the Post all agree that her behavior changed considerably after that night.
Experts remind us that sexual assault victims often have inconsistencies in their accounts of the details, and that holes in memory are normal after a traumatic event; we also know that only 6 percent of college sexual assault reports turn out to be false. Even if we were to prove that Jackie flatly lied about the details, the fact still stands that she experienced trauma that night. And the fact still stands that situations like these are a problem all over the nation, and over-scrutinizing victims in the absence of an investigation is not going to solve it.
Apparently, people in the journalism business are quick to jump on a source at the slightest indication of inaccuracy. But I have yet to see the wave of journalists who are questioning the fraternity’s statements in the matter. Phi Kappa Psi says that it didn’t have a party on the weekend Jackie discussed in her account. If we’re going to assail Jackie with skepticism, where is the skepticism for the fraternity, an institution that has its name and reputation to uphold both to the university and to potential members all over the nation? Certainly, with so much on the line in this debacle, it wouldn’t take much for a fraternity to lie. If we’re going to scrutinize, let’s at least scrutinize equally.
A fraternity has an agenda; a lone young woman does not. And let’s not forget the several other cases of sexual assault at UVA the Rolling Stone story touched on — UVA is a poster-child of the sexual assault culture in our universities, a place where people who cheat on exams get expelled, but those who admit to committing sexual assault don’t. UVA is one of 90 U.S. universities in under federal investigation for mishandling sexual assault cases (and yes, if you were wondering, that list includes CU Boulder).
Research has shown that fraternities contribute heavily to “coercive sex,” that fraternity members are more likely to approve of coercing women into sexual behavior and that fraternity members are three times more likely than other college men to commit sexual assault. It’s no secret that frats engage in behavior like instructing members on how to lure their “rapebait,” and marching through campus chanting “No means yes, yes means anal!”. UVA’s own frats have a long-standing chant called Rugby Road, which the Rolling Stone story highlighted and which includes such lines as:
All you girls from Mary Washington
and RMWC, never let a Cavalier an inch above your knee.
He’ll take you to his fraternity house and fill you full of beer.
And soon you’ll be the mother of a bastard Cavalier!
And despite all this and the painfully obvious fact that all social fraternities do is supply alcohol to underage, vulnerable sexual targets, universities welcome fraternity activity on their campuses — they know it attracts more students and makes them more money in alumni donations. Compounding the sexual assault culture is the fact that universities almost never expel men who are found responsible for sexual assault; more often, the victim ends up dropping out. Some universities discourage victims from reporting to the police, which is good for their reputation, but bad for the students; a lack of evidence collected by a criminal investigation makes it harder to prove an assault. The Washington Post has reported that up to 95 percent of college sexual assault cases go unreported and unpunished because victims often think they won’t be believed, or they fear that universities will want to keep the incident quiet to protect their reputation.
It is high time that universities begin adequately investigating and dealing with sexual assault cases. At this point, the debate over whether there really is a rape or sexual assault culture in our colleges should be over. The often-repeated statistic that one in five women will experience completed or attempted sexual assault in college isn’t all-encompassing — it was based on a study of 5,446 undergraduate women at two universities— but it tells of the larger story. Ninety colleges in 35 states are under federal investigation, and that’s just for the mishandled cases we know about. We need to empower victims, not chastise them for possible inconsistencies. If journalists should be jumping on anything, it’s the culture of UVA and schools like it that perpetuate these sexual inhumanities, whether it’s Jackie or the myriad other cases out there. Maybe it’s time we started valuing our young women more than we do our moneyed, privileged fraternity culture — when we never have to write stories about students like Jackie at all, then we’ll truly have something worth the media frenzying over.
Contact Opinion Section Editor Ellis Arnold at ellis.arnold@colorado.edu.
