Date Rape | Introduction
In the spring of 1991, a thirty-year-old single mother accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward Kennedy and a scion of America’s most famous political family, of raping her. The woman had met the thirty-one-year-old Smith, who was enjoying a brief vacation from medical school, at a nightclub in Palm Springs, Florida, not far from the Kennedy’s multimillion-dollar estate. After the two left the club together, Smith drove the woman back to the family compound, where he allegedly raped her on the lawn. In December 1991, millions of Americans watched Smith’s ten-day trial on television. The complainant tearfully delivered her testimony, describing how an innocent meeting at a nightclub had ended in sexual assault. Smith countered by explaining that the sex was consensual, and, after spending an estimated $1 million in legal fees for his defense, was acquitted of the charges.
Widespread media coverage of Smith’s arrest and trial focused national attention on the issue of date rape, which is a rape committed by a person with some level of romantic relationship to the victim. Acquaintance rape is perpetrated by someone who is not a complete stranger. The allegations against Smith follow a pattern typical of many date/acquaintance rapes, in which a man meets a woman in a public place, gains her confidence, and invites her back to his home. He then engages in nonconsensual sex with the woman through implied or spoken threats of physical harm, the use of force, or taking advantage of her after she has passed out under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
In 1991, the view that a woman could be “date raped” was a new and controversial way of thinking about rape. Most people had long considered rape to be a violent crime committed by a stranger in a dark alley, not an instance of unwanted sex with an acquaintance. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, feminist activists on college campuses promoted a broader definition of rape that included situations in which women were pressured into having sex against their will or violated while intoxicated. They based their reasoning on the results of a survey of college women conducted by University of Arizona Medical School professor Mary Koss, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in 1987. Koss’s study found that 27 percent of college women surveyed had experienced a sexual encounter that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape. In addition, Koss found that 80 percent of these incidents were committed by someone the victim knew. Most of these rapes went unreported to school authorities because, as Koss maintains, the women had an unclear understanding of the legal definition of rape and tended to blame themselves for the rapes. To Koss and the feminist groups who found these numbers disturbing, many more women were victims of rape than previously understood; thus, the term date rape offered women a new way to describe rapes that were far more common but just as psy- chologically damaging as the stereotypical stranger rape.
The mainstream media initially responded to Koss’s conclusions with calls for action and “surprise that such large numbers of female students reported having been victims of assaults matching the legal definition of rape,” according to Molly Dragiewicz, a professor of women’s studies at George Mason University. But by mid-1991, the high-profile William Kennedy Smith trial had ignited a contentious public debate over date rape and accelerated what some feminists dubbed a cultural “backlash” against anti-rape activists. A few critics familiar with research techniques argued that Koss had greatly exaggerated the number of college rape victims by using an overly broad definition of rape and counting regrettable episodes of sexual miscommunication as rape. Other observers questioned whether a broader definition of rape would do the victims of violent rapes a disservice by trivializing the crime of rape. In May 1991, shortly after sexual battery charges were brought against Smith, the New York Post published an editorial expressing this concern. It stated, “What strikes us as dangerous is the elasticity of the term ‘rape.’ We wonder whether it’s now being stretched in a manner that causes the American people to underestimate the gravity of the crime itself.” The editorial goes on to make a clear distinction between what it views as real rape—a violent, criminal assault against a woman—and a “sexual encounter, forced or not, [that] has been preceded by a series of consensual activities— drinking, a trip to the man’s home, a walk on a deserted beach at three in the morning [references to the Smith case].” The editorial provoked a storm of controversy, but Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times soon followed the Post’s lead and ran articles that treated the issue of date rape with greater skepticism.
Since the early 1990s, the date-rape debate has continued on college campuses across the United States where co-ed dormitories, alcohol abuse, and casual sex lead to frequent accusations of sexual assault. A National Institute of Justice survey of 4,446 college women published in 2000 found that “for a campus of 10,000 women, . . . the number of rapes could exceed 350. . . . These figures suggest that rape victimization is a potential problem of large proportion and potential public policy interest.” Under pressure from parents, campus activists, and the federal government, college administrators have taken action against the perceived threat of date rape by instituting date-rape prevention programs and policies.
Some of these policies have generated controversy, in particular, the unique procedures that colleges follow when adjudicating charges of date rape on campus. Determining the guilt or innocence of the accused often involves a disciplinary hearing conducted by college administrators. Private colleges are not bound by the U.S. Constitution and can conduct hearings under procedural rules of their own design. With little substantive evidence to go on, settling date-rape accusations frequently comes down to one person’s word against another’s. Critics contend that many hearings, particularly at private colleges, favor the woman’s version of events by making it difficult for the accused to present his side of the story. For example, Columbia University, an elite Ivy League school in New York City, has come under fire from civil liberties groups who assert that its sexual misconduct policy violates the basic rights of the accused. According to libertarian commentator Wendy McElroy, sexual miscon- duct hearings at Columbia “do not allow a ‘defendant’ to face his accuser or cross-examine witnesses. . . . Nor is the defendant allowed to have an attorney present during the proceeding. With a maximum of ten days’ notice . . . the defendant is expected to prepare a defense on which his academic career might hinge.” McElroy illustrates the unfairness of this policy with a worst-case scenario involving a student nearing graduation who is accused of having committed date rape in his freshman year (complainants have five years from the date of the alleged incident to file a complaint) and is “denied every basic right of due process guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Schools that have amended their sexual misconduct policies in the interest of fairness have met with equal controversy. After receiving criticism for the expulsion of a student accused of date rape in 1999, including protests from some faculty members, Harvard College implemented a new sexual misconduct policy in 2002. This policy was intended to address the “he said, she said” aspect of date-rape accusations by stipulating that “any student who alleges that another student has committed an act of sexual misconduct . . . must provide ‘sufficient independent corroboration’ or ‘proof’ before the College will launch an investigation,” according to an editorial by attorneys Wendy J. Murphy and Ellenor J. Honig in the Harvard Crimson. The policy has been criticized by women who feel that the university is abdicating its responsibility to protect the rights of female students. Murphy and Honig, opponents of the policy, maintain that determining the truth in sexual misconduct investigations has less to do with examining evidence than having properly trained investigators, interviewers, and judges oversee sexual assault cases. On August 5, 2002, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced a formal investigation to determine whether Harvard’s policy is in violation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1972—a law that requires schools to have “prompt and equitable” procedures to resolve accusations of sexual harassment and assault. The resolution of this investigation may significantly impact the way campus sexual misconduct policy is written in the future.
The continuing battle over date rape on college campuses illustrates how the expanded definition of rape first advocated by researcher Mary Koss remains a highly controversial issue in American society. On the one hand, it is clear that the concept of date rape has gained a significant level of cultural acceptance due in large measure to the campus and community activism of the anti-rape movement. In addition, the American legal system has taken the “no means no” slogan of feminists seriously; several state courts have handed down sexual assault convictions in cases where the accused acted without force or threats of violence. On the other hand, in a society that values freedom and personal responsibility, critics remain reluctant to endorse a definition of rape that in their view excuses women for behaving irresponsibly. Observes cultural critic Camille Paglia, “Every woman must take personal responsibility for her sexuality. . . . When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences.” Whether the concept of date rape offers women a meaningful way to define and combat rape is debated and discussed by the authors in At Issue: Date Rape.
