My biggest fear in life is being assaulted.
It is a fear that frequently bombards my thoughts, especially as I walk alone at night.
Waking up at 2:22 a.m. last Friday morning to an IU Alert that a woman was assaulted in Dunn Woods by two men, possibly armed with a knife, only heightens this fear.
The attack happened on campus near the Sample Gates in a well-lit area. I walked home alone just an hour before she did.
This easily could have happened to me.
And the odds are not so slim. One out of five undergraduate women at IU reported being the victim of an attempted or an actual rape in the campus-wide survey released this fall.
If this doesn’t shake you, there is something horribly wrong.
I am growing tired of reading about reported rapes in the dorms. We call it breaking news, but when is the news no longer breaking if sexual assault, rape and battery become so commonplace on this campus?
I am growing tired of receiving alerts on my phone in the middle of the night.
I am tired of being afraid when I walk home from class late at night and reprimanding myself for listening to music in case someone comes up behind me. Because it’s my fault if I didn’t hear my attacker approaching, right?
I am tired of wondering what might happen if I risk walking home alone from the bars at night. Whether I am perfectly sober or not, I have a right to feel and be safe.
An app on my cell phone, like the Companion App, is not going to stop an assault. Instead, it slaps a used band-aid on the problem along with the responsibility, falling once again, on the woman to protect herself.
I am sick of this backward rhetoric.
If I call my friend while I’m walking alone, maybe no one will approach me. If I clutch my can of pepper spray as I walk, maybe I can fight off an attacker. If I promise to text my friends that I got home safely, they’ll know if something bad happened.
Whether I take these useless precautions or not, being assaulted is something which I have no control of.
I can’t really say I care that nearly 95 percent of IU undergraduates have “participated in some sort of program, event, training or class” dealing with sexual assault, President Michael McRobbie.
We are breeding a culture of fear, not a culture of care.
Education programs must begin at an earlier stage, and the responsibility should be on the University administration to end this culture of rape.
If IU handled sexual assault cases as strictly and as seriously as it handles underage drinking cases, maybe some progress could be made.
It’s on all of us, IU.
nrowthor@indiana.edu
@nrowthornIU
