Re-education

AT THE University of Minnesota, some 5,700 new students arrived on campus for orientation earlier this month. Each one of them has taken a course on campus sexual assaults. A new law, which came into effect on August 1st, made it mandatory for all university freshmen in the state of Minnesota to be given training within the first ten days of the school year. Minnesota is unusual for the breadth of its decree, but students, parents and university administrators across the country are asking the same questions about how widespread campus rape is and what to do about it.

California was the first state in the country to pass a law colloquially referred to as “Yes means yes”, which requires affirmative consent for sex to be considered legal. New York followed suit in 2015. Last year George Washington University became the first to make training on sexual assault compulsory for new students. The White House has its own task force on protecting students from sexual assault.

Crime statistics suggest universities are no more dangerous in terms of sexual violence than other places where men and women both congregate, but that is not much solace. Statistics on sexual assault are notoriously hard to compile, but the best attempt from the Association of American Universities found that 23% of female undergraduates reported some form of sexual assault. An internal poll at Harvard suggested almost a third had. Victims of sexual assault rarely speak up; even when they do, sexual assault can be devilishly hard to prove. Yes to Sex, a phone application that was introduced in April, aims to help partners clarify and document sexual consent in under 30 seconds. But use of the service has not taken off: it has only a few, mediocre reviews on the iTunes store. Without such pre-planning, proving consent was or wasn’t given after the fact is often difficult.

Many sexual assaults happen during the “red zone”, the time between the start of the school year and Thanksgiving, says Kathryn Nash, co-founder of TrainED, a company that counsels colleges on legal compliance. “A high percentage” of these cases involve freshmen. Miss Nash attributes this to freshmen being on their own and having access to alcohol for the first time. She says that in 75% of cases one or both parties have been drinking. Various public-health studies link sexual assault and binge-drinking, though some students think this is blaming the victim. Sheryl Morrison, whose daughter Victoria is a freshman at Saint Thomas University in Saint Paul, blames “irresponsible drinking behaviour” for the majority of incidents, adding that her daughter does not drink. Tony Burton, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, says that most of the tips in the training he went through were “common sense.” This is not the case for everyone. “A lot of kids arrive at college thinking ‘if someone doesn’t say ‘no’ I can keep going,’” Miss Nash explains.

Ann Olivarius, a lawyer for victims of sexual assault, believes the problem has been exacerbated by the availability of pornography. The internet has made sexually explicit images and videos accessible to anyone with a smartphone. This, she says, has engendered a sense of sexual entitlement among men. On the other hand, the web has focused attention on the problem. News of sexual assault spreads much more quickly and widely than it did before the era of digital media, which may encourage more people to come forward.

Because rape violates criminal law, it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. To increase conviction rates, the White House is pressuring universities—by naming them publicly, fining them or threatening to withhold funds—to deal with more cases on campus, where rape has to be proved just on the balance of probabilities. The sanctions a university can administer are less severe than prison time, but on the extreme end they can still amount to “career capital punishment” says one university president, who is hiring former judges to staff his college’s tribunal.