Civil Discourse

Blah blah blah, bling bling blah.

That's pretty much what people hear anymore when they get to talking about sexual assault. Regular readers of the Dec know that this is our what, 50 billionth article on the subject in so many weeks and are probably pretty tempted to skip over it.

But for every time I am asked to swallow one more article that I don't want to read, for every new set of statistics intended to amaze and astound that only tell me what I think I already know, I am forced to put things in perspective; the articles are more frequent and the statistics more seemingly impossible because the situation isn't improving.

Hard to believe, you say. Certainly everybody knows by now about rape. And maybe, yes maybe, in other less culturally enlightened areas of the world sexual assault is a very serious problem indeed. But here, at Mr. Jefferson's university, virtually an Ivy League institution for god's sake, it seems to happen pretty rarely. When was the last time, after all? Last year, last month? Yesterday?

Who knows? Sometimes I think the truth about sexual assault doesn't even matter anymore. I'm so sick of the lip service, of the Cavalier Daily editorials, of the Dec editorials, of the ads in the back pages of the newspaper, signed by all the fraternity presidents with a seal of approval from the Dean of Greek Concerns, that promise "zero tolerance" for sexual assault. I can only assume the Dean of Students office means by this statement zero tolerance for reported rapes, as their policy initiatives since that particular advertisement have consisted of generally ignoring sexual assault reports.

So unless you count Grounds for Discussion as a serious attempt to address the problem, you'll probably find that the administration's prevention policy concerning sexual assault is, well, nothing. Often, offices like Greek Concerns even turn down opportunities to help SARA with proposed initiatives. And SARA or SAFE, which seem to be university-affiliated, actually get very little funding from the school. The money allocated to reseeding trampled grassy areas around the school could cover either organization's budget for a surprisingly long period of time, and they have to rely on outside donations and fundraising as much as possible.

I understand why so many people think the school and the administration spend too much time dealing with sexual assault. They do their level best to present that image, but for all their "sensitivity," they have nothing -- not one policy, not one real position -- to show for it. If only they spent as much time dealing with rape as they do avoiding it, if only they spent their money on prevention instead of taking out a full-page ad proclaiming their commitment to the issue, they might have a better record.

Viewpoint consists of the majority opinion of the managing board of The Declaration and is written by the executive editor on a weekly basis.