A Message From Your President

My computer pings signaling the arrival of yet another email. With my position comes a lot of emails. I am shocked to see that the subject line does not read “meeting request” or “issue to look at”. In the subject line is one word: raped. As I feel my anxiety begin to go up I open the email and begin to read. It reads like a scene out of a bad crime novel; a girl woke up in the morning in an unfamiliar bed not remembering how she got there. She recognizes the gentlemen next to her but does not know his name. As she swears to herself that she will never get that drunk again, the shirtless boy slowly turns his head and looks at her. He smiles. This is promising. “How much did we have to drink last night?” the girl asks trying to figure out what happened. “The boy grins again, this time not so friendly, and says, “Me? I didn’t drink a bit.” And it hits her like a freight train. She didn’t have that much to drink last night; two, maybe three drinks. She began to feel odd and went looking for her friends who she knew were somewhere close. A guy she did not know asked if she needed help. She said she needed to find her friends. He insisted she did not look well and needed to lie down. As she became even more lightheaded, she was hardly able to put up a fight as the unknown man guided her into his room.
            I wish I could say that I do not receive these emails often and before this semester I did not. For whatever reason however, I am getting more emails about girls be sexually assaulted than ever before. From a guy friend who takes it too far and does not understand the word “no” to a woman waking up in the bed of man without any recollection of how she got there; girls we have to wake up. It is time to pop the DePauw bubble.
            Guess what; sexual assaults happen on this campus and if DePauw follows the national trends, the vast majority will never be reported. We have fantastic twenty-four hour resources and an extremely kind and very hard working police force. We don’t have these just for the sake of having them; we have them because something has happened at some point on this campus to make them necessary. These women have contacted me because they have heard of more and more women like themselves.  Many of these women have already been working with therapists and the police but I know that these women are only a fraction of the total victims. Seeing a rising trend, I felt it was time to reach out to all of the women of DePauw.
            The truth of the matter is that this is not a topic we talk about on this campus. We all know someone it has happened to but we don’t discuss it. Why? If there were a wild animal running around campus biting women, we would definitely talk about it. Whether it is because women are embarrassed, think they will have to see their attacker around our small campus, or feel like it was “deserved” somehow, we have a responsibility to one another to talk about this, to demand that it stop. I don’t want another email from a girl wondering why she is hearing that her friends are being hurt. Women who have been assaulted, you are not alone. Women who know someone who has been assaulted, help and love them. ALL women of DePauw, stand up, fight back, and for heaven’s sake TALK. The worst thing we can do when something like this is on the rise is pretend as though it does not exist at all.