Why the Campus Rape Crisis Confounds Colleges by Michelle Goldberg

During her freshman year at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 2010, Audrey Logan says, she was raped on two separate occasions by a young man she considered a friend. Because she knew him and had been very drunk both times, it took a while for her to identify what had happened as an assault. “I really believed rape happened in the dark, by people you barely or don’t know, and weapons or group force were always involved,” she says.

Such a reaction isn’t uncommon. According to a National Institute of Justice study, campus rape victims who are incapacitated by drugs or alcohol very rarely report their attacks to police, and more than a third say it’s because they didn’t realize a crime was committed or harm was intended. “It wasn’t until a close friend at another school simply listened and validated my feelings that I finally was able to start my arduous healing process,” Logan says. Once she accepted that she’d been violated, she waited until March of her sophomore year, when her assailant was studying abroad, to report him to the administration.

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