Either a place is safe or unsafe. I am not obligated to go somewhere just because there are people of one ethnicity or another. And if I need to go somewhere because of some other need, safety is always a consideration whether the needs supersedes safety concerns.
Perception of safety is often not based on facts. For example, Hyde Park, where U of Chicago is located, is actually one of the safer Chicago neighborhoods.
Similarly, most women feel safe in their own homes, apartments, and dorms, yet we are often victims there too.
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Random thoughts in no particular order:
- the Univ of Utah spike in rapes, which appear to have stemmed from one individual criminal, highlights how prolific some criminals can be.
- There are men & fraternities who would not just stand by and do nothing as a female was getting SA’d while she was incapacitated. Those stories don’t get on the front page of national news.
- From a ‘watching out for your personal safety’ point of view, being female IS a different experience than what most men experience. There’s personal safety situational awareness situations that my husband is completely oblivious to. Even when my daughter & I explain it to him, it still doesn’t quite register.
- For example, U of A is in Tucson. City of Tucson has a dark skies ordinance because of the solar observatory at the top of Mt Lemmon. This means there’s no street lights anywhere. It’s DARK at night. EVEN in parking lots like the grocery store or Walmart. So at night around Tucson if we’re at Walmart or wherever, I purposely will NOT park in certain spots because it’s too dark. D26 agrees w/me on this. My husband? He does NOT see what the big deal is and thinks we’re making a mountain out of a mole hill.
- OR consider this…next school year, my kid & some friends are probably going to rent an off campus apartment. D26 & her girlfriends don’t want a first floor apartment. To a lot of females, this seems like a pretty obvious preference. To some men (including my husband unfortunately), it’s silly. Why would a woman not want a first floor apartment? Because she’s trying to limit the total # of ways a criminal could break into her apartment. Because she doesn’t want to get SA’d in her sleep in the middle of the night because some guy broke in through the apartment window.
- When we were looking at colleges w/D26, campus safety data WAS a factor we looked at. And by that, I mean the annual campus safety data usually published by a college/university’s police department.
- I don’t think the general “men bashing” that’s going on in this thread toward some of the posters is helpful in terms of having an actual discussion about the topic of rape and greek life. If you don’t want to hear the answer to a question, then don’t ask the question. But ask a question on a message board, and you CAN get answers that are not what you expect. Having hard conversations and being willing to listen to what the other side has to say is how we can all grow going forward. Otherwise, it turns into a big echo chamber like you see all over social media for the past few years.
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Is it really “general”, or is it aimed at what some of the men are actually saying? Like the post that the men here are rational and dismissing the women as emotional? Yes, I will “bash” men who just trot out tired stereotypes about women (including victim blaming) again and again. And it is relevant, because those attitudes are part of the problem being discussed. And I recognize that these views, by the way, are not represented by all men here.
Also, being prepared to listen to other people goes both ways.
And that personal anecdote is part of the disconnect in experience that we are seeing writ large here.
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The president of my sorority was attacked in her room. Had she been drinking? No. Was it a frat boy? No. Was our house on campus? No. It was the week before most people moved into the house (so only a few in the house, and the house mother not there yet). It wasn’t even another student, but a street person who got into our house and her room was the first one on the second (sleeping) floor. Was this reported as a crime on campus? No, because our house was several blocks from campus.
Our house shared an alley with the house where JonBenet Ramsey lived and was killed. It was a nice neighborhood with million dollar homes. The attacker broke in. It would have been much easier for him to have walked into a dorm. Or if he was a student, to have attacked another person who lived in the same co-ed dorm. Frats and sororities are still single sex at most schools.
Ted Bundy attacked women on college campuses and killed several. Why? Because colleges are the easiest place to find 20 year old women (who have little or no supervision) and that’s what he was looking for.
The stats posted need to have more info if they are going to be compared. Student attacking another student? On campus or off campus? Frat or sports house under university control or just a house rented by some soccer players or guys who know each other but the house is off campus? Some schools do police the areas right around campus so attacks or fights or public drunkenness might be reported in statistics but at other colleges those stats aren’t reported.
Is there a safe campus for every situation? No. There are students at BYU who drink or have (gasp) sex even though it is against the student code of conduct. There are colleges without Greek life but there are still problems - looking at you Princeton and Notre Dame.
There certainly are campuses where drinking and drug use is much less and people are welcome to go to them, but they may not be what your child is looking for. It’s pretty hard to find the classes and atmosphere of Michigan at a school without Greek life, football, dorm parties, co-ed dorms (or even co-ed in general).
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Well and it certainly doesn’t help when rapists and abusers are “upstanding members” of the community or the popular people.
About 15 years ago, there was a student at the school I work at, who SA’d a girl and the parents acted like it was a smear campaign against their son, because this could affect his full ride sports scholarship and he was the school’s star baseball player and he was Mr. Popular. The guy did loose his scholarship when it came out, that besides this incident, he had made many inappropriate comments to other girls and even to female teachers. But still, his parents acted like it was a witch hunt against their kid and family. Would the tables turn if it was their daughter who was the victim?
There was a youth group leader/pastor at one of the churches in our area who lets just say was being very inappropriate towards some of the kids in the youth group. This went on for years and people did report him, but nothing was done. The guy and his family eventually moved away. This guy also coached little league in our area. We knew people who left the church because they reported him and nothing was done. But, of course he was the nice guy with two kids and a beautiful real estate agent wife, why would he do something bad?
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Continue to stand firm on this, even if your husband continues to call you and your daughter silly.
I had a ground floor apartment in medical school, and my window was pried open and my room ransacked in the middle of the night. Luckily I was not sleeping there that night. One of my roommates was home but slept through it. The guy was caught inside a second home in the neighborhood (and they knew it was the same guy because he had my checkbook.) The police informed us he had recently been released from prison where he had served a sentence for homicide.
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This is also part of the issue. This was a bad dude. He wreaked havoc once. Isn’t that enough?
So many criminal acts are done by repeat offenders. Different topic for a different thread, but many criminal acts wouldn’t happen if people weren’t given a second chance after committing a heinous act.
Thank goodness you weren’t in your bed that night.
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But is it really different, when this thread has already noted a few times that the vast majority of campus rapes are repeat offenders? I agree with all the above you are saying in this context. Campus rapists should not be allowed a second chance after
committing a heinous act. But there are a number of social and institutional reasons that rapes are so under-reported, both in general and to the (non campus) police.
A number of reasons are given, including this one below, fear that the police won’t take them seriously, and fear of reliving the trauma through the months it takes to get to trial and through the trial itself.
Victims, especially those in college, know that reporting rape comes with a social risk, especially when the perpetrator is someone they know. At a small or midsize college, the rapist is likely to be part of the victim’s social circle. “I’ve seen this in every single case. The victim lose friends or becomes a social pariah. If you report on a really small campus, it’s really difficult to re-integrate after you report,” says Bruno.
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Just a note here: Under current law, the house of a school sanctioned sorority (and fraternity) is included in Clery crime reporting & is covered by Title IX policies. They were not in the past, but there have been some strides made over the years.
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Are they repeat offenders who have already been convicted, or are they repeat offenders who are found to be such only after being caught? I.e. a serial rapist (or other criminal) might not be known as such until after being caught and then linked to multiple previous crimes beyond the one initially arrested for.
The research I read did not specify.
I hope you never need a doctor or group of doctors in an academic medical setting. Some of the top specialists in the world work in “urban” hospitals which are in neighborhoods I suspect you avoid. You can- of course- find a reasonable substitute working in a suburban satellite facility adjacent to a few leafy gated communities where upscale looking folks go about their law abiding business.
But when your own doc says “This is the woman you need to see- she does more of these complex procedures than anyone else in the country” I imagine your “fear” of a bad neighborhood dissipates pretty quickly.
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This was in today’s paper. Worth a read.
This is the argument we should be having about the Cornell rape case
The article is paywalled. Can you please provide a summary?
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Totally agree with you. D26 & her friends definitely don’t want a 1st floor unit for all of those reasons. Thankfully, D26 is pretty stubborn so she’s not going to give in on this one. 
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And yes that’s a huge issue. I don’t know if TV is true (like an SVU), but some may also say they don’t want to wreck someone’s life, even though they wrecked theirs - because maybe they’re in a nearby social circle or something and don’t want to disrupt that.
All crime needs to be reported, thoroughly investigated and acted upon. Given the bar to convict in our country, the he said / she said scenarios are tough to begin with.
So yes we need victims to report - on this thread many have said they don’t. Hopefully going forward that can change. And yes complaints need to be investigated tirelessly and completely until there is a vetted conclusion.
We all need to deal with all the risks we face in our own way. I am not obligated to face them the way you deem appropriate.
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If that is the doctor I am looking for, I would go in daytime, not in a nighttime. At least we have environment awareness, and reduce the risk.
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Author Nicole K. McNichols is a Cornell alum, former sorority girl, now current professor at University of Washington as a human sexuality professor. Her class encompasses the topic of consent and assault. Here is a segment as I cannot seem to do a gift article for some reason.
…”I worry that in our need for retribution and justice, we’ve shifted the focus off prevention. Investigations and prosecutions must happen but that’s not how we keep today’s undergraduates safe. The issue of sexual assault on campus will not be solved by outing and punishing a small set of bad men.
The research on why men commit assault says the risk factors include attitudes toward women, hostile masculinity and an impersonal view of sex. The idea that there is a “type” of monster we need to find and weed out is a myth that keeps women vulnerable. Instead, we must initiate change on two fronts: legally and academically.
Legally, the local district attorney declined to charge anyone in 2024 because, in his words, the victim took the drugs and alcohol voluntarily and wasn’t unconscious. He was applying New York’s Penal Law correctly. That law only counts intoxication as incapacity if someone else administered it or the person was unconscious. However, simultaneously Cornell was legally required to use the affirmative consent standard New York has imposed since 2015, which says an intoxicated person may be unable to consent. Two definitions of consent, in one house, on one night. To address this, New York should close the voluntary intoxication loophole.
Education on college campuses also should be completely overhauled. The last time the Center for Disease Control evaluated the efficacy of collegiate sexual assault programs was 2014. Out of 140 programs, three showed actual evidence of reducing assault.
This doesn’t surprise me. As someone with a window into what incoming undergraduates do and don’t know about sex, students are unprepared by U.S. high school sexual education programs. Forty-three states emphasize abstinence and only 16 require consent education. Most states still offer a shame-based abstinence-promoting system that frames sex as something men try to “get” and women are charged with “protecting.”
Last quarter, a student came to my office to tell me that my class had made them feel more comfortable asking for what they want sexually and better able to recognize when something felt off. That isn’t unusual. What was unusual: In the next breath, they said that they’d seen a young woman alone and drunk at a party. They knew to walk her home. Sexual literacy and sexual assault prevention go hand in hand, and my student proved it.
Cornell’s own task force, formed because of this case, recommended a three-credit sexual citizenship course. Cornell declined to require it.
Require a sex education course. Michigan is testing one right now, and New York already mandates the standard it would teach. I am working with the UW to make my class a requirement. And in the course, don’t just tell students that sexual assault is wrong, or that inebriation means consent isn’t present. Teach students how these assaults occur — and can be prevented.
Membership in fraternities predicts worse attitudes and more aggression. The risk lives in the group’s norms, not the building. Abolishing chapters moves the fraternity off campus without changing anything about their conduct. My sorority sisters looked out for each other at parties, a norm nobody had to announce. That same structure needs to be formally baked into fraternity life. If you see something, stop something.
The sole predictor of whether a man steps in to stop sexual assault is whether he thinks other men present would speak up. That’s pluralistic ignorance, and it’s how a Snapchat invitation to join a rape can go out to a group and nobody stops it.
If we can change the conversation and the fundamental education around sexual assault, we will finally understand that the question that would have protected Jane Doe was never what “kind of man” was in that house. It was what the other men in that chat had never been taught to recognize.”
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