Raped Where Rape Doesn’t Exist

In a lengthy, detailed investigation, Kiera Feldman interviews victims of sexual assault at Patrick Henry College, the bastion of evangelical elites, and describes how the college’s fundamentalism makes it hard for them to get justice:

Last September, the school chose Dr. Stephen Baskerville, a professor of government, to deliver a speech that the entire student body was required to attend. He argued that feminism and liberalism have transformed the government into “a matriarchal leviathan.” The result, he said, according to a copy of the speech, was a society plagued by politically motivated “witch hunts” against men—while “the seductress who lures men into a ‘honeytrap’ ” was really to blame. “Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of ‘rape’ in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual,” Baskerville explained. “This is especially rampant on college campuses.” (In a statement, PHC said Baskerville’s speech was “an exercise in academic freedom” and not “endorsed by the administration.”)

“When you have a culture of license where you can’t tell the difference between what’s full rape or fake rape and what’s real rape,” PHC journalism professor Les Sillars added during the post-speech Q&A, “it makes dealing with real rape really, really hard.”

Researchers estimate that one in five American women is sexually assaulted in college, and Patrick Henry College’s unique campus culture has not insulated the school from sexual violence. In fact, it puts female students, like Claire Spear, in a particular bind: How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?

Hanna Rosin, who wrote the book on PHC, comments:

A Patrick Henry statement says the expected things: that they don’t “elevate one gender above the other” and that they don’t view women who experience sexual abuse as “deserving of their fate.” But the problem is baked into their philosophy. An “innocent” woman in their context is one who never ever breaks the rules, which would mean never getting in a car or sitting on a bed with a boy. That’s where Patrick Henry shares borders with Andrea Dworkin: all sex is at some level a violation of women. But that line, whether it comes from an evangelical or a feminist, is unlikely to foster a situation where college kids or their administration can make reasonable decisions about what constitutes sexual assault.

Dreher passes along an e-mail from a recent PHC alumna, disputing Feldman’s characterization of the school’s culture:

The TNR piece said women interested in government or leadership are viewed as “unmarriageable.” Nothing could be further from the truth—my smartest, most politically savvy, strong-willed female friends are either dating, engaged, or married (with a couple exceptions, and those women have turned down multiple requests). The meek, frightened, abused woman in the TNR  piece just doesn’t exist: at least not at the fault of the school. There may be larger, familial issues there, but it’s not an issue of institutional patriarchalism.

And Leah Libresco puts Feldman’s report in the context of sexual assault on college campuses in general:

Patrick Henry’s Christian ethos informs the tone in which these students were brushed off (you’d be unlikely to hear concerns about purity at a public or secular private school), but the alleged underlying betrayal is more attributable to being a university than a Christian one in particular.

Treating Patrick Henry’s crisis as unique because of its singular status as a private, Christian school (one of only four private colleges in the country that decline federal funds and, thus, aren’t regulated under Title IX) masks a broader problem with administrations’ treatment of students in crisis, one that isn’t limited to sexual assault.