Rape on College Campuses

Rape on College Campuses

Nicole Johnson*, a 22-year-old senior at an area university looks back at her college experience as graduation approaches, generally happy with how everything turned out, however, a dark cloud still looms over her freshman year when she was raped.

“I went to a party with a few girls I just met,” Nicole recalls. “I had two beers and felt really drunk and could barely stand up.” After lying down in an empty room in the apartment, Nicole only remembers the moment she woke up. “I passed out and when I woke up there was a guy having sex with me. I woke up in the middle of it.”

Johnson has become a statistic. In America, 1.3 women are raped every minute, 78 every hour, 56,160 every month, and approximently 683,280 women will be sexually assaulted by the end of this year. The attacker could be a perfect stranger or someone she knows, either way creating an emotionally damaging situation.

Legally, one might wonder how sexual assault is defined. According to Massachusetts State law, there are two major categories of sexual assault against adults. One of these is rape, and the other is indecent assault and battery. Rape is defined as “sexual intercourse or unnatural sexual intercourse with a person and compels such person to submit by force and against his/her will, or compels such person to submit by threat of bodily injury.” Rape and attempted rape are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The crime of indecent assault and battery occurs when an attacker, has non-consensual physical contact with a person in a sexual manner. This could be any unwarranted physical contact to a person’s private body. This assault is punishable to up to five years in prison.

The majority of sexual assaults are committed against women between the ages of 15 and 25, making college-aged women the group with the highest vulnerability to being assaulted. In fact, according to Kelly Walker from campusspeak.com, and a sexual assault survivor, one in four women will be raped during their college experience. Furthermore, during one’s freshman year, they are at the highest risk time for assault, according to the Northeastern University Police Department.

The Northeastern Police Department has their own web site with an extensive report on sexual assault and its statistics. In 1990, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crimes Act was put into place.