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There are a lot of colleges where I live, so campus sexual assault has become a huge issue over the last few years.
I've worked at a couple of the colleges in my area, and I've seen some disturbing things. Right now the conversation is pretty much limited to student-on-student violence, but when we start talking about the way male professors and administrators use and abuse female students THEN we will start making real progress.
At one school, I worked in the faculty dining lounge. This college is one of the oldest, wealthiest and most exclusive schools in the nation and the faculty dining lounge is basically a private club with a buffet and full restaurant service. When I worked there, I noticed that one of the professors would bring a different young, blonde, curvy student with him to lunch every day. He would spend a couple hours dazzling them with stories of his greatness, showing just enough interest in the girl to flatter her, and she would hang on his every word. I didn't need to be an expert on body language to know he was sleeping with at least a handful of those girls--and none of them had any idea that they were being used.
At another school I worked at, they were recovering from some financial problems and so they would host these extravagant donor dinners. They claimed these dinners were to thank the donors--but all the catering staff knew exactly what was going on. Old, rich, white men would fly in from all over the country and come to the dinners. The college would invite a selection of students, who they claimed represented their best and brightest and yet somehow the best and brightest always seemed to be very attractive young women. The old men would spend the evening flirting with the young women, and they would be flattered, and sometimes at the end of the evening the staff would overhear students being invited back to hotel rooms to "discuss their futures." And, coincidentally, a check would soon arrive from the man who had invited a student home with him.
I finally had to swear off working on college campuses, because I really wanted to go back to school and finish my degree and I couldn't even stomach the thought when I had to spend all day every day watching the excess and abuse that goes on behind the scenes.
And I'm not judging the girls. They might have gotten a lot out of these interactions, but the fact that they were all so unaware of the way they were being used makes me furious. It's one thing to say to yourself, okay, I'll ignore this sexual harassment for a little while because in the end I'll be financially secure enough to find a safe place to work. It's another thing to be so naive you don't even notice when you're being pimped.
It's dangerous too. When I was being sexually harassed by my work supervisor at the second college, I kept thinking to myself "well, he's just being inappropriate and not actually threatening and I really need this job so...."
Then, one night, he tried to rape me and when I escaped and got in my car he tried to follow me home. I had to drive 100 mph at midnight on tiny dirt back roads to lose him. If I had listened to my instincts and reported him sooner, I wouldn't have had to go through that.
Fortunately, he was just a supervisor, and so there was a higher authority I could appeal to. Over half of the management team was women, so when I went to my actual boss and told her what happened the first thing she did was wrap me in a big hug and apologize for not protecting me better. The second thing she did was have my supervisor escorted from the premises, and someone walked me to my car for a month afterwards in case he tried to come back. In the weeks that followed, other women began to approach me and thank me quietly for reporting him. Apparently he'd been hurting a lot of people, but everyone was too scared to stop him. I even found out that in the days before I reported him he'd started following some of the female students back to their dorms.
This experience taught me that if you don't deal with a predator, you're not just putting yourself in danger. You're putting everyone around you in danger too.
And I don't harbor resentment towards my supervisor either. He was an alcoholic having a mental breakdown and his behavior was more of a reflection on himself. He ended up in the intensive care a few weeks later, and to this day I don't know if he survived.
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