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Crime on campus
The US Department of Education is investigating whether Boston University actively discourages rape victims from reporting their assaults
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI
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Nowhere to go IN HER FEDERAL civil-rights complaint, Kristin Roslonski claims that Boston University fosters a climate hostile to sexual-assault victims, in part because the school does not have a rape-crisis center on campus. Since 1998, students at BU have circulated petitions, staged rallies, outlined proposals, and sought funding for such a facility — all to no avail. Such disregard for students’ pleas, Roslonski contends in her complaint, not only prevents women from coming forward to report rape, but also "allows the university to decentralize" — that is, cover up — "its crime reporting." The lack of a rape-crisis center has certainly led to a host of problems. Last spring, 20-year-old BU junior Elizabeth Edwards headed the push by the BU Women’s Center, a student-run organization that works on women’s issues, for such a building. Edwards explains that the Women’s Center has heard steady complaints from students — five during the fall 2001 semester alone — about the poor services and treatment offered by the university to students who have been assaulted. Says Edwards, "The most common complaint I hear is that there’s nowhere to go and no one to help." Sometimes, school employees come across as insensitive to victims’ needs. Take Amy Nathan, a 21-year-old senior who was raped three years ago. In May 1999, Nathan (whose name has been changed) went to a fellow BU student’s Allston apartment to drink beer and hang out. She fell asleep on the couch and awakened to the nightmarish discovery that a male friend of her classmate’s was having sex with her. Nathan later confided in her roommate, who encouraged her to report the rape. But she didn’t want to go to the police. And she didn’t want to go to a counselor because of what she calls "the stigma of rape." All she wanted was to take care of her physical health. So she made an appointment with BU Health Services to get the morning-after birth-control pill. During her visit, she divulged the details of her rape. A BU mental-health counselor urged her to tell the police, although she had expressed her desire not to. Still, the counselor pressed. "I wanted her to say, ‘We support you no matter what,’" Nathan recalls. "She lacked any compassion." According to federal law, the counselor could have recorded the rape for the purpose of tracking statistics without Nathan’s having to file a formal — and public — complaint. But there’s no way to determine whether Nathan’s rape was included in campus crime statistics three years ago. Marianne Winters, of Jane Doe, a Boston-based victim-rights group, sympathizes with Nathan’s response. Winters has spent more than 10 years treating rape victims and training crisis counselors at the Rape Crisis Center of Central Massachusetts. A counselor’s job, she says, "is to provide basic emotional support. You want to make sure a person feels believed and validated." That means finding out how the victim wants to handle her assault and helping her do it. "It’s not my job to push a survivor into legal action," Winters explains. "The decision has to be the victim’s." Lisa Ebert, a 20-year-old BU junior, also faced insensitive treatment when she reached out to the university two years ago. Ebert (not her real name) was not raped at BU; her assault occurred before she’d arrived on campus. Yet the trauma of the rape didn’t manifest until she left home. She couldn’t sleep. She suffered panic attacks. She had fainting spells. A friend suggested that she visit the BU Martin Luther King, Jr. Counseling Center, which offers therapy to survivors. But when she got there, a counselor told her to go elsewhere. "It took so much effort to make the appointment, and they told me to go home like it was nothing," Ebert recalls. Months later, Ebert witnessed a similar response on the center’s part after a friend of hers was assaulted by a fellow student. The two called BU Health Services for the crisis-intervention counselor, who is supposed to be available 24 hours a day. Yet they were told no one could assist them after 5 p.m. — something that Winters calls "inappropriate." "If there’s supposed to be 24-hour crisis intervention," she says, "that victim fell through the cracks." That, of course, speaks to the value of having a rape-crisis center on campus — or, at least, a designated building where assault victims know they can go. But with no sexual-assault hotline or rape-crisis center, "victims have no obvious place to go," says Nathan. "BU needs to get its act together." — Kristen Lombardi
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BY NOW, KRISTIN Roslonski’s story has been told many times. Since the former Boston University student publicly accused the school of covering up her rape complaint last November, one article after another in the Boston Herald, the Boston Metro, and the Daily Free Press (the BU student newspaper) has highlighted the titillating details of what is, no doubt, a messy case. We have heard all about the raucous partying that took place in the hours leading up to the early morning of November 5, 2000 — when a male student allegedly raped Roslonski with a vibrator in his Claflin Hall dorm. We have heard how Roslonski, then an 18-year-old freshman, had swilled vodka straight from the bottle before she passed out. How, earlier that evening in a dorm lounge, she had straddled the male student whom she would later accuse of assault. How she was captured on videotape exposing her breasts and thong-clad buttocks to a room full of young men. How she had engaged in oral sex with her alleged assailant minutes before he brought out the vibrator. In the reams of media coverage, Roslonski hasn’t come across as a sympathetic figure. Instead, she’s been portrayed as a pitiful, drunken young woman who probably asked for it. In a November 29, 2001, column in the Boston Herald, for example, Margery Eagan took aim at Roslonski, declaring that "this is just not the case to inspire one to march in the streets for the beleaguered women of Commonwealth Avenue." The alleged victim, Eagan advised, "should heretofore skip the vodka and the propositions." What the media blitz failed to emphasize, however, is that a medical exam conducted five days after the alleged assault found evidence of vaginal tearing and swelling consistent with "some form of sexual manipulation," leading to a diagnosis of "sexual assault," according to Roslonski’s medical records. And what the public hasn’t been told at all is that the federal civil-rights complaint Roslonski filed against the university with the United States Department of Education (DOE) has precedent-setting potential that could affect not only Boston University, but every college and university in the country. Last month, on December 21, 2001, the DOE took the unusual step of opening an investigation into the Roslonski complaint. It’s an unusual step because it’s rare for the department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) — the division responsible for enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws — to examine sexual-assault complaints. According to OCR spokesperson Roger Murphy, the department received 4897 complaints alleging civil-rights violations against colleges and universities in 2000. Only 43 of them were related to sexual harassment — ranging from unwanted sexual overtures to sex being made a condition for passing a course. In 2001, the OCR logged 46 harassment complaints out of some 4500. The OCR, Murphy says, responds to every complaint, but "not nearly as many" merit an on-site investigation, as has the Roslonski suit. Murphy confirms that this case is unique: "It’s rare for us to receive a civil-rights complaint that rises to [the level of] these allegations in the first place." Daniel Carter, who handles policy issues for the campus-crime watchdog group Security On Campus (SOC), based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, concurs. In the past decade, the SOC has filed some 70 DOE complaints against colleges related to rape. Of those 70, however, the DOE found that only 12 merited a full-blown investigation. Says Carter of the Roslonski suit, "I know of no other case like this." Typically, sexual-assault complaints charge that a university violated federal regulations for reporting campus crime, thus failing to maintain a safe environment. Yet Roslonski takes this charge a step further, alleging that BU has carried out a pattern of dissuading victims from reporting rape, which constitutes sex discrimination. BU isn’t the only school accused of discouraging victims from reporting rapes. Boston attorney Wendy Murphy, who has represented dozens of sexual-assault victims in civil lawsuits against Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and BU, has discovered that institutional coercion leveled to silence rape victims has been on the rise ever since passage of the federal 1990 Campus Reporting Act, which mandates that schools disseminate crime statistics. "Since that law went into effect," she says, "I’ve seen an increased number of universities taking tactics to stop women from coming forward." Colleges, after all, have an incentive to minimize incidences of rape. High statistics make for a bad public image. That, in turn, affects a school’s ability to draw certain students, or charge a certain tuition. Explains Murphy, "The tension administrators feel between wanting to do right and not wanting their institutions to look like a campus rife with rapists can work against victims." The SOC’s Carter puts it more succinctly: "Colleges are afraid of the adverse publicity." Roslonski’s 26-page complaint, filed November 23, 2001, has certainly thrust BU into the spotlight. The suit charges that the university botched the investigation into her alleged assault and discredited her allegations in order to avoid reporting the rape — as federal law requires it to do. It also alleges that BU "knowingly ignored" the definition of assault, which includes acts where the victim "is incapable of giving consent"; that it retaliated against her for filing a rape complaint; that it failed to adequately train officials in counseling; and that it fosters a hostile climate for assault victims. The suit identifies an "unnamed class of individuals" who’ve been raped at BU. To date, two other students have signed onto the effort, albeit anonymously. "If the DOE supports this," Carter explains, "it would establish that schools are not able to retaliate against sexual-assault victims who file complaints." That may sound like a given, but right now nothing in the law defines retaliation as a civil-rights violation per se — and such a definition would be a powerful incentive to curtail retaliatory moves. Adds Carter, "The potential precedent-setting nature of this complaint should make other colleges across the nation sit up and take notice."
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Issue Date: January 17 - 24, 2002
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