I am writing in response to Brad Salmen’s article “Four things your Macalester professors will never tell you” (Opinion, Nov. 9). His column suggested that the recent rape and sexual assault statistics distributed by STARSA are inaccurate and we should all be “checking our sources” before believing such “myths.” Well, I checked the source the author cited to make his argument, and I have to say I’m not too impressed. The Web page from which the data was taken was clearly anti-feminist propaganda, and as a Macalester student, I would expect that the author would take a site’s agenda into consideration when writing an article that is intended to make us all aware of an “enlightened” point of view.
Whether or not you believe it, women do get raped and sexually assaulted, and it happens more often than any of us would like to admit. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) Web page, which extracted data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1997 National Crime Victimization Survey (www.rainn.org), somewhere in America, a woman is assaulted every 2 minutes, and less than one-third of these assaults are reported.
The problem I think the author has (and he is certainly not alone in this), is the way he has chosen to define rape and sexual assault. Regardless of the accuracy of the one “fallacious” study cited, the fact remains that it is possible women may not be aware that they have been raped, and it is equally possible that they would be dating their “attacker.” The face of rape is much uglier than that of some masked stranger lurking in the shadows-we are raped by our acquaintances, our friends, our relatives, our boyfriends, and even our husbands. In fact, “approximately 28 percent of victims are raped by husbands or boyfriends, 35 percent by acquaintances, and 5 percent by other relatives” (www.rainn.org.stats.html). Sixty-eight percent of us know our attackers, and almost one-third of us are in committed relationships with these men! It’s no wonder these crimes go unreported. After all, we don’t think that the men in our lives would strip us of our humanity like that, so we make excuses for them, make ourselves believe it was our fault or that it wasn’t really rape. Why then, would it be so unbelievable that we may not know we’ve been raped when we’ve spent so much time convincing ourselves that we haven’t?
Salmen’s opinion implicitly defines rape as something that cannot happen within relationships, and something that is only done by some raging lunatic with a knife in hand to a girl he’s never met before. This, however, accounts only for a small percentage of the sexual assaults and rapes that occur in the U.S. I think when the nature of rape and sexual assault is examined fairly, it is evident that these statistics are unfortunately valid and accurate.
