How could it have been rape if her friends were so close by? If she would have screamed, would someone have come to stop him? They were both drinking. How do you define consent? I define it like this: My friend had sex with a man with whom she did not want to have sex. At best, she was sexually assaulted. At worst, she was raped. Either way, it should not have happened in silence as it did.
According to the National Institute of Justice, for every 1,000 women attending college, there will be 35 incidents of rape in a given academic year. One in four women nationwide will experience rape over the course of her lifetime.
Rape is not an anomaly to Amherst College, and if you have been raped on the Amherst campus, you are in good company. In preparation for writing this article I spoke to a number of my friends about rape at Amherst and what it meant to them. Not one of them, not a single person I spoke with, was without at least one if not more close friends who had been raped on the Amherst campus by another Amherst student. If you have been raped at Amherst, you are not alone.
What happened at the Zü last summer was horrible, but it is not the only rape that has ever occurred at Amherst. It should not take the loss of three pints of blood for us to see rape at Amherst. It is unfair for Taharqa Patterson '05, and it is unfair for the woman who came forth to report this rape that their incident has become the singular face of rape at Amherst.
The current social climate surrounding rape at Amherst is totally unacceptable. It should not take three pints of blood for rape to become a visible crime. One out of four women should not have to survive a crime as heinous as rape. Something needs to change here at Amherst, and the movement will not come from the Peer Advocates or the Feminist Alliance. It will not come from the professors or President Marx, and it certainly will not come from Freshman Orientation. The only source for sustainable change has to come from us: from every one of us. We as a community have an obligation to play an active role in preventing what is, I believe, the most severe problem on our campus.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. This, like most issues of social change, must be attacked from many fronts. First, talk. Just talk. Talk to your friends about what you believe constitutes consent. Amherst is a small campus. The people you talk with are bound to be the people you party with, and since 90 percent of rapes on college campuses involve the use of alcohol by one or both parties, it is not unlikely that this conversation will pay off, if not for you directly, then for one of your friends.
Share stories. Experiencing rape or sexual assault should not strip you of your identity, nor should it be a secret for you to bear. Talk. Listen. Begin to understand what rape at Amherst looks like. As long as it is invisible, it will only continue to spread.
Rape and sexual assault can no longer be voiceless crimes. Survivors of rape and sexual assault should not feel that telling their stories makes them victims. The only way to solve this problem, or at least to work towards decreasing this problem in the Amherst community, is one step at a time. I charge every student at Amherst College to start a conversation about rape, sexual assault or consent. Whatever our experiences with the issue, each of us has a duty, as a member of a society in which a quarter of all women are raped at some point in their lives, to do at least this much. Furthermore, I charge every one of us to listen to our friends, family members, friends of friends, who no doubt have their own stories to tell.
Inaction-but I'm not a rapist, I have never been raped-is no longer an acceptable option. Talk. Listen. The solution will come, but it must come from us: from our voice as a collective student body.
Durwood can be reached at
egdurwood@amherst.edu