"Sexual assault is grossly underreported," says Harwell. "The national studies indicate that slightly less than five percent of offenses get reported to police. People are concerned for privacy and don't necessarily want to bear the stigma of being the victim of sexual assault in any kind of public way."
(There are male sexual-assault survivors, too, but they're even more unlikely to report, given the onslaught of gender-related crises that accompany the already staggering amount of trauma a rape survivor experiences, especially if the victim is a straight man who's been raped by another man.)
In short, since relatively few incidents of sexual assault are reported to campus or city authorities, it's difficult to get an accurate barometer of what is actually going on.
For the past few years, though, schools have made progress in identifying a clearer picture of what sexual crimes are occurring on campus, and that is what makes the impending budget cuts so unfortunate.
Because college campuses tend to have higher incidences of what can be defined as "rape," a number of area schools are working to revamp and enhance the sexual-assault resources available to students on campus, developing programming aligned with a public-health model devised by the Center for Disease Control, which examines the "symptoms" of sexual violence, in order to devise a way to prevent it.
"The CDC is looking at changing attitudes and beliefs that allow sexual assault to go on," says Peggy Barrett, the director of Community Awareness and Prevention Services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC). "They want to prevent it, in the same ways that you can prevent a disease, and are trying to get to the source of the problem, which is a very different way of looking at this."
In order to work to prevent sexual assault, says Barrett, one must look at dispelling "hyper-masculine" paradigms — such as the idea that men are strong and women are weak, or that women lead men on and, therefore, get what they deserve — and the environments that support them. "We see prevention as a larger social-change issue," says Divya Kumar, the co-coordinator of the Violence Prevention and Response Program at MIT. "In the past, prevention was placed on potential victims and survivors, but we are looking at prevention as helping our community members to take some responsibility."
The DOJ's Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) is a proponent of that philosophy; it provides federally funded money to colleges that are developing progressive sexual-assault programming and focusing largely on ways to combat underlying causes of sexually aggressive behavior.
That program, known as the Campus Grant, was used to fund the sexual-assault prevention-and-response programs at Northeastern, as well as similar programs at Tufts and MIT. "The Campus Grant program was born out of knowing that college campuses are unique environments that require specially tailored responses to sexual assault," says a spokesperson for OVW, who asked not to be identified. "You have a really closed environment on campus. A victim of sexual assault has to see her perpetrator everywhere; she'll run into him continuously, see him in class. . . . Colleges need to be able to respond quickly at an administrative level, and also [with criminal charges], if that's what the victim chooses to do."
