Every college freshman has heard the lecture. Young women are encouraged to walk in groups, especially at night. They are given phone numbers for volunteer escorts and shown call boxes all over campus for use anytime they feel nervous about being followed.Men and women are told about the dangers of drinking and drugging. And all are reminded that sexual intimacy must be consensual and respectful of both parties.
Despite all of this, rapes occur on college campuses.
Two reports on National Public Radio last week have an important bearing on this topic. One describes personality characteristics of these attackers. The other explains the neurological development of adolescents.
According to the first study most college rapists are not outsiders, but are other students. It suggests that these young men are often repeat offenders who see nothing wrong with their behavior. And they are frequently neither caught nor punished.
The study* calls our attention to some important - and difficult - questions. How and why do rapes happen on campus? What can be done to prevent them? What can you do if it happens to your own child? and, finally, what if you suspect that your youngster is not a victim, but a perpetrator?
Fortunately, most young people will never be victims of or responsible for such attacks. But unfortunately when these incidents do occur, they can cause both physical and emotional pain. They are frequently not reported until years later, often in psychotherapy, since the sufferers often feel ashamed and humiliated and believe that they were somehow responsible for what happened to them. They assume (not necessarily incorrectly) that others will also blame them rather than their attacker.
I have worked with both men and women who were forced to have sex against their will while they were in college. For some, the experience undermined their ability to trust others, sometimes very subtly, sometimes so seriously that they had ongoing difficulty developing healthy intimate relationships. Like many trauma survivors, they felt isolated and different from anyone else they knew. Unable to talk about their experiences, they also lost the ability to trust their own feelings and perceptions, even those that had nothing to do with the assault.
Other clients showed no sign of long-term psychological damage from the event. Although the experience had been terrible, they came into therapy for other reasons - a breakup with a girl or boyfriend, a problem on the job, a lack of direction in life - and in the course of our work told me about the assault. But they did not have either the excruciating self-doubt or lack of connection to others that I saw in the first group.
What made the difference?
In most cases, it seems to have been the availability of a trusted adult with whom they had an established, secure connection. They were able to immediately turn to this person, in most cases one or both parents, for comfort, sympathy, and helpful advice. Some of the parents went to be with their daughters or sons, while others did not. Some contacted the school, others left it up to their child; many encouraged them to see a counselor, often someone familiar with the issues that related to this kind of experience.
Although each parent reacted differently, what seems to have been most important was that 1) there was an ongoing, supportive relationship already in place, and 2) that they listened to what their youngster said and responded to what she or he needed from them.
And this brings us to the second report on NPR last week, "The Teen Brain: It's Just not Grown Up Yet.". According to research cited on this program, the part of the brain affecting judgment is not fully formed until our mid-twenties. The logical conclusion from this data is that, despite contemporary cultural insistence that college kids should be independent of their parents, they are not yet ready to function on their own.
College is a time for getting ready for, not a time to be completely autonomous. Having an open phone line does not mean being the dreaded "helicopter parent," hovering inappropriately and intervening intrusively as youngsters and administration put it. It does mean that, instead of looking into their eyes to see if they're okay, parents listen, not just to their kids' words, but to their voices. Regular phone contact can often help parents know when a college student is not getting enough sleep or not eating well. They can tell when there's too much alcohol consumption or partying going on; or when a youngster is alone too much. All of which makes it much easier to know when and how to intervene, and when and how to let them work it out themselves.
This balance is a very difficult one, made harder by the emphasis in our culture on separation and independence. But here's another thing: given that many rapes on college campuses occur when one or both of the young people have been drinking or using drugs, a greater degree of parental guidance might actually eliminate a number of these incidents. The evidence is that the teen brain becomes even less capable of rational decision-making when affected by alcohol and drugs.
It is possible for parents to set limits with college students. If an adolescent is partying too much to study, his grades will show it; and parents, who both care about this person and are paying his bills are within their rights to demand some sort of change in the behavior. Obviously, most partiers are not rapists. But limiting the behavior might protect our sons and daughters from being victims, and sometimes, from being victimizer.
This of course does not give adults the right to interfere in all aspects of that young person's life. Again, finding a healthy, useful balance between connection and separation is not at all easy. But if parents, administrators and students could struggle to find a more optimal balance than the "independence is everything" model we tend to utilize these days, we might well see a decrease not only in assaults, but in a variety of problems that trouble students on college campuses today.
*One major problem with this study is that it bases broad generalizations on a tiny sample of the more than 15 million students enrolled in colleges in the US every year.
