Know Your Enemy

If any of you were feeling secure in Charlottesville's deceptively small-town atmosphere, last week's news was a nasty reminder of how fundamentally unsafe the world can be. I'm speaking of the rape that occurred last Thursday night under Beta Bridge, a place where many of us have walked alone and after dark. The horror of the situation is incomprehensible to me; any attack is terrifying enough, but rape by a stranger must be beyond anything one can imagine rationally. The old warnings still apply: don't walk alone, stay on well-lit paths, and so on. I know that most of the time I don't heed them -- I don't always feel like taking the long way around or making my friends follow me all the way out to my house. For a while, at least, let's give the escort service something to do.

But let's also not lose sight of how rape usually works. Stranger rape represents a small percentage of rapes; most occur at the hands of someone the victim knows and, often, trusts. All the well-lit paths in Charlottesville won't do a thing about acquaintance rape. I am glad to see the coverage in the news of the Beta Bridge rape; usually these incidents are kept on the down-low in Mr. Jefferson's town, strangely enough. The community's awareness of the situation can only help in a case like this, especially with the potential for further attacks. But the community (university or greater Charlottesville, take your pick) must also be aware of the more pervasive threat posed by acquaintance rape.

Chances are it's happened to someone you know. It's a real phenomenon, a dishearteningly not-that-uncommon experience, and still is not always recognized as rape. It's as damaging as stranger rape, if not more so, because of a dearth of social support and awareness and the ever-popular "blame the victim" mentality. Acquaintance rape presents a more immediate problem, but continually gets buried under fear of stranger rape.

While rape in general is just beginning to receive the amount of attention it should, too much of that attention is focused on the comparatively uncommon occurrence of stranger rape. In our heightened awareness of and anxiety about this issue, we must keep in mind that, in order to truly make progress, we need to devote more time, consideration, and resources to acquaintance rape. If we neglect this need, we risk the health and safety of our society as a whole.

-- JLP