Yup, That’s Dated: On Sexual Assault
Sixteen Candles via Universal Pictures
Yup, That's Dated is the first in a new series where we dissect the terrible lessons we absorbed growing up in the '80s and '90s — and learn more from experts studying those topics today.
By Leslie Price
Coming of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s meant absorbing confounding, often contradictory, advice on how to avoid sexual assault — particularly at college. We were told that we really needed to keep our wits about us. Common advice included things like: Don’t drink too much, or stay out too late. Always travel with a friend. And of course, be wary of strangers! Maybe carry pepper spray on your keychain, or do that thing where you put your keys between your fingers like some sort of cut-rate Edward Scissorhands.
The focus, as you might recall, was on women. We were the ones making too many foolish decisions. We needed to be protected against a faceless bogeyman who would leap out of the shadows.
Date rape? I don’t personally remember much talk of it, let alone any discussion of consent or coercion. As Vox elucidates in this article, “it’s simply not the case that the mainstream culture at large in the ’80s had the same ideas we do today about sexual assault — especially when it’s perpetrated by people who know each other, at parties, around alcohol.”
To try to understand what, exactly, was going on back then, and to find out how scholars and advocates are thinking about the topic now, we spoke with Nicole Bedera, a researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan who studies sexual assault on campus. Our conversation’s below.
I started following you on Twitter because of a thread, which you posted last January, that contained your advice to parents worried about campus sexual violence. It was so contrary to what I was told when I was a teen. How did you get into this career path and area of study?
I was working as a victim advocate my junior year of college, seeing survivors immediately in the aftermath of their sexual assaults. And the most common question they would ask, over and over again, was, “Why did this happen to me?” They would blame themselves. “Oh, I was out too late.” “Oh, I accepted a drink from a stranger.” I could see how much it was getting to them. Instead of being upset at their assailant, they were upset at themselves. That would get reiterated; the police who would come to interview them would say, “You know, this is kind of what you get for drinking like that.” Or family members would be like, “This is what happens when you go around with guys like that.”
I had this realization: We’ve all heard these sexual-assault prevention tips. But they aren’t keeping us safe. Sexual assault is still a problem.
The term “date rape” was coined in 1980. But when I was teenager, there was no focus on date rape. It was really on this person-in-the-bushes type of attack. What was the point of the emphasis on stranger rape?
It’s one of the reasons these tips don’t work. They’re telling you to prepare for a stranger to jump out of the bushes, but stranger rape is incredibly rare. This comes from white supremacy. The myth of the black rapist was used as a way to curb civil rights, to maintain segregation, and to maintain Jim Crow, specifically in the aftermath of abolition of slavery. That’s where it comes from.
How would you say that education around this topic has changed? How are we talking to women these days, and also, what is being messaged to boys and men?
There are two different ways that college students will hear people talk about sexual assault. One of them is usually during first-year student orientation. There will be a session, that may or may not be mandatory, where they will learn about the definition of consent. This came from an idea that a lot of rape was happening because of sexual miscommunication. That had actually already been debunked in the ‘80s as well.
This consent education has not been super effective at curbing sexual assault, but it is useful in that it teaches potential victims to be able to recognize something as sexual assault a little bit faster and be able to get help a little bit faster. It also sets a standard on campus. Instead of survivors going back and forth in their heads saying, “But what if it’s a mistake, what if he didn’t know?,” they can now say, well, he attended the consent training. So he should know.
We are definitely behind in discussing issues of coercion and intimate partner violence. There are some researchers who are doing a good job at it, actually, like Charlene Senn. They are teaching young women those little red flags that start early on that can lead you to do things that, in retrospect, you don’t know why you would ever have agreed to.
The Aziz Ansari case is a good one to talk about. People like to write it off as “not quite sexual assault” in part because they look at “Grace” and say, “Well, why didn’t she leave?” Or, “Why didn’t she get dressed?” If you understand coercion, it’s a lot easier to understand how the power dynamics involved made her behave in ways that you or I might not necessarily understand, unless we’d been in that situation.
When you speak with parents, what part of this conversation are they struggling to get their heads around?
The thing parents struggle with the most is that they feel powerless. And to some degree, they are powerless, right? That is a hard thing to recognize. Parents give their children these long lists of things that they’re supposed to do, all the ways that they’re supposed to know better. But then, when their children are sexually assaulted, they won’t tell their parents.
One of the questions I ask in every interview with survivors is: “Is there anyone who you did not want to know that you were sexually assaulted?” By far, the most common answer is: my parents. They worry they’re going to be blamed, they worry that their parents will be so overcome with emotion that they’ll end up consoling them instead.
A very important thing for parents to know is that it’s not your fault that your child was sexually assaulted. But you can help them heal, or you can hurt them more. How do we make sure that if something happens, your child knows they can come to you and you can help them heal?
You have written about how, when parents are doing campus tours, there are questions they can ask the school. When I read that, I couldn’t help but think about my campus tours, which were basically about...looking around at the campus. Just looking at it. Just looking at the buildings. What should people ask about and look for on a campus tour?
Universities are getting away with a lot right now, because they assume that the people who are paying tuition — largely parents — don’t care about how sexual violence is managed, that it’s something we have just accepted as part of the culture of fun that happens on college campuses. Having parents push back on that narrative can make a big difference.
If you ask a school, “What do you do for sexual assault?,” they do have a canned answer ready. And they know that it will satisfy a parent who is uninformed.
Ask specific, pointed questions. How many victim advocates do you have per student? People would be shocked that some of the largest universities in our country only have one or two victim advocates. What kind of services do you offer? There are a lot of things that victim advocates are trained to do, but they often cannot afford to do them. Knowing the budget for the victim advocacy office, and suggesting it should be higher, can go a long way. Other types of questions I would ask include: How many Title IV cases end in a serious punishment? That’s something that they probably won’t know the answer to, but if people keep asking it, they’ll start to think, do we look bad for not seriously punishing assailants? What kinds of trainings are required of the high-risk men on campus? Who is conducting the training? And: Are the trainings empirically validated? There are some that we know do work. How are we going to make sure that sexual assault isn’t happening, and how are we going to support survivors if it does?