“Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process.'”
— Annie E. Clark, Feb. 28, 2013, Huffington Post
When I saw that sentence, it struck me as weirdly similar to the story told in Rolling Stone by Sabrina Rubin Erdely:
- A prestigious public university in the South.
- A freshman girl raped during a fraternity initiation.
- An activist’s story about administrative indifference to victims.
You may not recognize the name Annie E. Clark, but in January 2013, she was one of five complainants who accused UNC of violating the civil rights of female students in the handling of sexual assault charges:
Three UNC students, one former student and one former administrator filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday morning, claiming that the University facilitated a hostile environment for students reporting sexual assault.
The complaint, more than 30 pages in length, has emerged just one month after sophomore Landen Gambill and another female student revealed to The Daily Tar Heel how the University handled their rape cases.
Their stories — rich with what they called unequal treatment from administrators, inappropriate questioning in UNC’s Honor Court and blatant violations of rights — reflected what victims say is a deeply rooted problem at the University.
That problem prompted junior Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, who graduated from UNC in 2011, both of whom are sexual assault survivors, to spearhead the filing of the complaint in an effort to seek justice for survivors and change what they say is UNC’s culture of hostility. . . .
The complaint was also signed by Gambill, the female student who asked that her name not be used for safety reasons in the December [Daily Tar Heel] article, and former Assistant Dean of Students Melinda Manning, who stepped down from her position in December after 11 years at UNC.
Now, it is certainly not my intent to defend UNC’s administration or to claim to know what happened in any particular case. All I know about any of this is what the complainants themselves allege:
When sophomore Landen Gambill made the decision to press charges against her rapist through the University Honor Court in the spring of 2012, she assumed the process would be easy.
Armed with what she said were pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt of her accused student-attacker, Gambill thought she was just a hearing away from getting the justice she deserved.
She had endured months of sexual abuse from a long-term boyfriend.
But she said not even that abuse could have prepared for her for the kind she suffered during the University’s handling of her sexual assault case — a process she said was fraught with a clear violation of her rights that left her psychologically damaged and her ex-boyfriend innocent.
Uh, “a long-term boyfriend”? Stipulate that people sometimes get into relationships with partners who abuse them. Still, if Landen Gambill had “pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt” of her ex-boyfriend, why did she take her case to the University Honor Court rather than presenting this evidence to the police? The account Gambill gave the Daily Tar Heel of how she “was continually abused — sexually and verbally — by her long-term boyfriend” as a freshman at UNC, followed by “months of stalking, threats and harassment” after they broke up, is lacking in detail. Yet if his treatment of her was as bad as she says it was, why did she not pursue criminal charges against him?
That question must be left dangling, unanswered, because if Landen Gambill has ever explained this, I can’t find the explanation and it would be wrong to speculate. Therefore, let us return to Annie E. Clark’s Huffington Post column from February 2013:
Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had that been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity “initiation process.” I was a young advocate; I had heard stories of assault and I knew how to respond to survivors, but I had no idea what to do within the UNC university system. Therefore, I just went into action mode; my friend and I sat down in the wooden chairs in my residence hall room and began to Google resources and options for reporting… hours later, we still couldn’t find the proper university protocol.
When she asked me about my involvement in violence prevention, I shared that I was a recent rape survivor as well. We brainstormed, and together we came up with an idea: I would go to an administrator and report my assault the following week. I would figure out the resources available, and then I would share with her the process so that she could report as well.
We made a pact.
The next week I tried to report my assault. I was incredibly confident in my story as well as my new university home, and why wouldn’t I be? I was raped. It was violent. He was wrong.
“So why are you here today?” the administrator asked me.
“I want to report what happened and get counseling. I was raped.”
The response which I received left me both speechless and confused:
“Well… Rape is like football, if you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback, Annie… is there anything you would have done differently?”
I was then handed a multiple page-survey to fill out about my rape.
You can read the whole thing, but surely I am not the only one who senses there is something distinctly weird about Clark’s story:
- This occurred when Clark was a freshman in fall 2007.
- Her friend tells her she was raped at a fraternity.
- Clark had herself already become a rape victim at UNC.
- Clark also describes herself as an “advocate,” someone involved in “violence prevention.”
- After her friend reports being raped at a fraternity, Clark and the friend “brainstorm” and decide that — rather than report that crime to the police — what she needs to do is “figure out the resources available” by reporting her own “violent” rape to a university administrator.
Do you see what I mean in saying this is distinctly weird? I am not saying that Clark is lying, I’m saying that her story contradicts any common-sense understanding of what victims of rape should do. The reaction she describes from the UNC administrator — “is there anything you would have done differently?” — also seems distinctly weird, but here I will risk a speculative explanation: University officials hear stories like hers quite often, criminal prosecution is impossible, and all they can do is to attempt to comfort the victim and help her avoid repeated victimization.
It’s always a “he-said, she-said” situation, you see. The college girl and the college boy hook up, usually when both of them are drunk, and in the aftermath — often several days or weeks later — the girl declares that what happened between them was rape. There is no way to prove as a matter of criminal law that a rape occurred, however, and so the girl (and I use the word “girl” deliberately, because these stories almost always involve a teenage victim, usually a freshman) turns to campus officials and becomes involved in an extra-judicial administrative process like UNC’s Honor Court system.
One suspects the “Unfortunate Sexual Incident” files are stacked to the ceiling at a large public university like UNC. How many times a year do officials hear some variation of the stories told by Landen Gambill and Annie Clark? And how many times does it have to be explained that, in any “he-said, she-said” situation where (a) the victim was voluntarily alone with the accused rapist, (b) there is no clear evidence of rape, and (c) the accused rapist does not confess his guilt, it is impossible to prosecute the Unfortunate Sexual Incident as a crime?
Surely no one would seriously contend that officials at UNC or any other prestigious institution of higher education are pro-rape, yet these officials are in effect being accused of enabling rape and thereby violating the civil rights of their female students. Short of returning to an old-fashioned system of curfews and chaperones, or at least a determined crackdown on underage drinking, however, it’s hard to see what universities can be expected to do about the campus environment within which the Unfortunate Sexual Incident typically occurs.
The law of large numbers is at work here. Every fall, tens of thousands of teenage freshman girls show up on the campuses of colleges and universities. They go to parties, get drunk and hook up with boys. Some percentage of those hook-ups will be unpleasant, including some which are clearly criminal. Yet among those many hundreds of Unfortunate Sexual Incident files which pile up in the offices of university administrators, only a few will contain the kind of testimony and evidence that can lead to a successful criminal prosecution. This will leave the majority of complainants feeling that they have been betrayed by the system. Here were can cite the account of Landen Gambill:
“It’s incredibly clear that those people had no idea what sexual assault is, what consent is,” said Landen Gambill, a sophomore whose assault case was processed by interim procedures.
“They were not only offensive and inappropriate, but they were so victim-blaming.
“They made it seem like my assault was completely my fault.” . . .
In her trial, Gambill said she was forced to answer irrelevant and inappropriate questions.
“The woman student said to me, ‘Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would’ve broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn’t?’” she said.
Gambill said the court used her history of clinical depression and her suicide attempt — which she said was a result of her abusive relationship — against her.
“They implied that I was emotionally unstable and couldn’t be telling the truth because I had attempted suicide,” she said.
As I said previously, Landen Gambill’s account includes no detail of the abuse she suffered from her long-term boyfriend, and it would not be appropriate to speculate. Yet the reactions she describes from the Honor Court officials, and their unwillingness to take disciplinary action against Gambill’s ex-boyfriend, should lead us to pause and ask, “What really happened? Why did she keep dating this guy, if his behavior toward her was so atrocious?”
Here it is helpful to know that simply getting admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an academic honor. Only 29% of applicants are accepted and, among those accepted, 78% were in the top 10% of their high-school senior class. So we may assume Landen Gambill is highly intelligent, and that her ex-boyfriend, a fellow UNC student, is not a lowbrow street thug. How is it, then, that this elite young man sexual brutalizes this elite young woman who endures his brutality for many months as part of their relationship?
Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I simply lack the sophistication to understand the habits and attitudes of these elite students. Or maybe I could make an educated guess about what’s happening.
Never mind my guesses about that, however.
Right now, my suspicious mind is focused on how Annie Clark describes hearing a fellow UNC freshman’s tale of being raped “as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process'” in 2007. Clark told that story in a January 2013 Huffington Post column and then in the fall of 2014 we find that the story of a freshman at the University of Virginia being raped as part of a fraternity initiation becomes the focal point of Rolling Stone‘s story about campus “rape culture.”
If this is not merely a coincidence, what kind of non-coincidence is it? The Rolling Stone UVA story has been ripped to shreds, but what about this seemingly similar UNC story told by Annie Clark? Is it possible that some fraternities at some universities actually do encourage sexual assault as part of their initiation process? If so, why would these (hitherto unsuspected) practices be reported as having occurred at two quite prestigious southern universities, in stories appearing in two different liberal media venues, within the span of two years?
Is this just an Atlantic Coast Conference problem, or what? Are there no rape initiations for fraternities at second-tier state universities? Are freshman girls not being raped by frat pledges in the Midwest, or at private schools in the Northeast?
There is something distinctly weird about this, and I don’t know what it is. However, I can report that Annie Clark has turned her activism into a full-time career as co-founder of a non-profit group called End Rape on Campus: “After directly working with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, she helped write the Bi-Partisan Campus Safety and Accountability Act.” Do you suppose that Annie Clark and her group had any contact with Sabrina Erdely or Erdely’s UVA liaison Emily Renda? I mean, we already know that Emily Renda’s anti-rape activism led to her testifying in June at a Senate hearing chaired by Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin:
“A range of sanctions is about getting survivors through the door,” Emily Renda, a special intern in the Office of the Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer, at the University of Virginia, said before the committee. Renda spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism and worked with a White House task force that investigated campus sexual assault. . . .
Some of Harkin’s fellow senators, including Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have been leading reform efforts.
So, Kirsten Gillibrand is “leading reform efforts,” and Kirsten Gillibrand worked with Annie Clark’s “End Rape on Campus” group, and Emily Renda (who “spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism”) turns out to be the official UVA contact for Rolling Stone‘s Erdely, who told this story about a freshman girl being raped as part of a fraternity initiation.
Maybe this is all just a coincidence, but it is distinctly weird.
