'Rape culture' investigation shocks Virginia university

22:00 | 25.11.2014
'Rape culture' investigation shocks Virginia university

'Rape culture' investigation shocks Virginia university

(BBC) - The allegations made in the latest issue of Rolling Stone are shocking. An 18-year-old University of Virginia freshman attends a party at one of the school's oldest fraternities in the fall of 2012. "Jackie", as she is called in the article, is invited upstairs by her date, where she says she is gang raped by seven fraternity brothers.

Jackie didn't go to a hospital after the alleged incident, as her friends decided it would adversely affect her- and their - reputations at the school. In 2013, the story continues, Jackie reported her rape to the head of the school's misconduct board, Nicole Eramo.Jackie was presented with the choice of going to the police, beginning a formal complaint or having a mediated session where she could confront her alleged attackers."Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of a school offering to handle the investigation and adjudication of a felony sex crime - something Title IX requires, but which no university on Earth is equipped to do - the sheer menu of choices, paired with the reassurance that any choice is the right one, often has the end result of coddling the victim into doing nothing," the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, writes.Jackie decided she couldn't go forward.The Rolling Stone story expands beyond the one allegation and its subsequent fallout and looks at how the university has handled suspected rape cases over the past decades - including multiple allegations of gang rapes at the fraternity in question, Phi Kappa Psi.Last year, the school discloses, there were 38 reports of sexual assault. Nine became formal complaints, and four resulted in misconduct board hearings. "The other 29 students evaporated," Erdely writes.She adds that 14 students have been found guilty of "sexual misconduct" in the school's history, but none has been expelled. According to Erdely, the most recent student, found to have been responsible for multiple assaults, was suspended for one year.When Erdely asked university president Teresa Sullivan why the university keeps its rape disciplinary proceedings private, she said it would discourage women from coming forward. Jackie tells Rolling Stone she was told by the dean that it's "because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school"."At UVA, rapes are kept quiet, both by students - who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture - and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal," Erdely writes.The University of Virginia is one of 86 schools currently under investigation by the Obama administration's Department of Education for their handling of sexual-assault-related complaints. It's also one of 12 schools undergoing a more thorough "compliance review" of its policies for dealing with sexual assault on campus.Fallout from the Rolling Stone article has been swift. Initially, the school placed Phi Kappa Psi "under investigation". The federal judge originally named to head the inquest was later withdrawn after word spread that he was a member of the fraternity in question.As outrage mounted, the fraternity voluntarily suspended itself during the proceedings.In a letter to the Virginia student paper, the fraternity said it had "no specific knowledge" of the magazine's claims, but it would co-operate with authorities."Make no mistake, the acts depicted in the article are beyond unacceptable - they are vile and intolerable in our brotherhood, our university community and our society," the letter states.On Saturday Sullivan announced that she was suspending all fraternity and sorority activities - involving about 3,500 students - until 9 January and calling on the Charlottesville, Virginia, police to investigate Jackie's allegations."The wrongs described in Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us to re-examine our responsibility to this community," Ms Sullivan writes in a letter to students. "Rape is an abhorrent crime that has no place in the world, let alone on the campuses and grounds of our nation's colleges and universities."Bakudaily.Az

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