(Sexual assault trigger warning) I'm mostly going to leave this link here, discussing sexual assault at conservative Christian Patrick Henry College, because it really speaks for itself. But I'm going to highlight a few pieces that really shouldn't be missed.
First, if you haven't been raised in a conservative Christian culture (thank your lucky stars...), you need to understand what goes into male-female relationships in that worldview -- a view PHC seems to take strongly to heart:
The self-policing that courtship culture requires, however, is not egalitarian. Responsibility falls disproportionately to women, who are taught to protect their “purity” and to never “tempt” their brothers in Christ to “stumble” with immodest behavior. “The lack of men’s responsibility or culpability for their own actions and the acceptance of male ‘urges’ as irresistible forces of nature is the understructure of Christian modesty movements and their secular counterpart,” the journalist Kathryn Joyce wrote in Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. These movements, she noted, see “women’s bodies as almost supernaturally perverse and corrupting.”
At Patrick Henry, one alumna remembers a chapel lecture that compared women who have had sexual contact before marriage to used cars. “You want to be a Porsche,” was the message, she says, adding in an e-mail, “They basically at no point accounted for sexual assault/rape etc (cases where girls’ ‘purity’ was taken from them) and left many girls who’d been victims in the past feeling ashamed.” According to a current PHC junior, the school puts the “burden” on female students to ward off the male gaze—be it from students or professors. She remembers being called in to talk to the residential director, who told her that a male professor had informed the Office of Student Life that her shirts were too revealing when she bent over.
It's a mentality that is fundamental to victim blaming: the victim is guilty long before the assault happens. She's the temptress, leading the man astray. Men react to women's signals, so if something has happened, it happened because she initiated it, and she okay'ed it. Even if she said "no", well, it's still her fault: she had started something she couldn't control.
The view is borne out by students' experiences reporting assault to Sandra Corbitt, dean of student life and the school’s primary disciplinarian.
Sarah says Corbitt grilled her on certain details: What was she wearing? Had she flirted with him or given him mixed signals? “The entire line of questioning was basically like, ‘Did you make it up? Or did you deserve it in some way? Or was it consensual and now you’re just lying about it to make him look bad?’ ” recalls Rachel Leon, Sarah’s roommate who had accompanied her to Corbitt’s office for support.
Listening to Sarah from across her desk, the dean was as polite as ever. But she didn’t seem to believe Sarah’s story at all. “If you were telling the truth about this,” Sarah remembers Corbitt saying, “God would have kept you conscious to bear witness to the abuse against you.”
This was not a one-off, either. Multiple students report similar experiences. Corbitt sees women as the problem, even if an assault had been threatened but not committed:
A male student was sending threatening messages, including an e-mail that conveyed that “he wanted to forcibly take my virginity,” she says. When she met with Corbitt to show her the e-mail, the student remembers the dean saying, “The choices you make and the people you choose to associate with, the way you try to portray yourself, will affect how people treat you.” In subsequent meetings, the student says Corbitt told her to think about her clothing and “the kinds of ideas it puts in men’s minds.”
And the story contains a number of additional accounts. I've personally known too many people with similar stories and heard too many stories like this from people who have gone to other conservative Christian schools (it was the crowd I was raised with) to not feel a little sick to my stomach reading through them; as if the campus rape epidemic wasn't bad enough...adding the Christian conservative fallback of victim blaming takes things to another level of gut-wrenching misogyny and heartlessness.
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