Telling Tales Out of School by Tifenn Python

A few days before fall break in October 2002, sophomore Emily Faulkner* stayed up late studying for a biology midterm in her room in Wannamaker residence hall. Around 5:20 a.m. on October 9, she walked down the hall to the bathroom. She noticed a young man in one of the stalls. She assumed it was someone's boyfriend who was spending the night. It wasn't.

The man grabbed her. They struggled, and Faulkner tried to defend herself with a penknife she kept on her keychain. The man turned the knife against her, cutting her on the face, chest, arm, and leg. He then sexually assaulted her.

The incident shook the Duke community. Undergraduate women began traveling in pairs or groups to bathrooms. Based on Faulkner's description of her assailant, and his presence in a residence-hall bathroom accessible only with a student identification card, many people speculated that the man was a Duke student. Despite extensive police investigation, to this day, no one has been charged in the incident.

A poised, friendly young woman, Faulkner, now a senior, is a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar and a pre-med student interested in pediatrics and women's health. She is also a statistic.

One in four women will be raped during her lifetime, according to the American Association of University Women. One in six will be the victim of a rape or attempted rape during her college career. Unlike most victims, however, Faulkner didn't know her attacker. And unlike most, she reported the assault to the police. By contrast, 90 percent of women nationally say they know the person who attacked them, and 65 percent of attacks go unreported. The American Medical Association has called sexual assault "the silent epidemic."

Hooking Up

After taking a few weeks off to be at home with her mother in South Carolina, Faulkner returned to campus. "I had very mixed feelings about coming back to Duke," she says now. "A part of me felt as though I could never go back to my room or be around my friends again. But another part of me wanted to move on with my life. I knew I wanted to go to medical school and was looking forward to going abroad my junior year. I didn't want to give up on everything I had worked so hard for."

With the encouragement of friends, Faulkner submitted a first-person essay to The Chronicle in November of that year titled "Sexual Assault Reality." She shared details about her own attack and extended an invitation to other men and women affected by sexual assault to send in their stories. "I was shocked by the response," she says. "I heard from men, women, parents, friends of assault survivors. After reading through them all, I knew I couldn't keep these to myself. I wanted to share the range of experiences with the rest of the campus."

With the contributors' consent, she and a group of students published Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at Duke in the fall of 2003. One woman wrote about being raped on the eve of graduation by a friend who had offered her a ride home. A black woman, raped by a classmate, said she decided not to report it because she felt it would reflect badly on the black community.

The book's frank and graphic portrayals of acquaintance rape--Duke women being assaulted by Duke men--shone a harsh light on a grim topic. The voices were angry, accusatory, and heartbreaking. Several survivors wrote of feeling incredulous and detached as the assaults took place. Others lambasted Duke for not doing enough to address the problem. The book became something of a primer about sexual assault for the Duke community and helped raise awareness about the preponderance of assaults that occur between people who know each other.

The following spring, a reported rape on West Campus added fuel to the flame. At a "scream in" on the steps of Duke Chapel, nearly 100 students, faculty members, and administrators screamed for a full five minutes to express outrage over what student organizers called the university's slow response to informing the community about the incident. "These are screams of anger at the pervasiveness of rape and violence towards women at Duke," said Alessandra Colaianni, the freshman who organized the protest.

Less than a week later, the annual Sexual Assault Prevention Week activities took on an added urgency because of the conversations still taking place about Saturday Night and the most recent reported assault. Events included the "pinwheel project," an installation of pinwheels on West Campus representing the number of men and women who will be sexually assaulted during their lifetimes; a clothesline project displaying T-shirts designed by survivors; and the "white ribbon" campaign, which encouraged men to wear a white ribbon and sign a pledge that they would never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women.

Despite complaints that Duke has been slow to address the problem of sexual violence, a look at other universities reveals that Duke is doing as much as and, in some cases, more than peer institutions to address the problem. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, the primary on-campus resources for sexual-assault survivors are the offices of the dean of students and student health. At Yale, peer counseling hotlines are augmented by the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education office. Stanford has a Sexual Assault Response and Recovery team led by staff members from its counseling and psychological services office.

But Duke has two full-time professional staff members, as well as dozens of student volunteers who serve as peer educators. Sexual Assault Support Services (SASS), established in 1990, provides crisis intervention, advocacy and counseling, and educational outreach programs on sexual assault and healthy relationships; sponsors Sexual Assault Prevention Week every spring; and offers self-defense workshops for women. And SASS is fully integrated into the university, working closely with Student Affairs and Counseling and Psychological Services, as well as such community entities as the Durham Crisis Response Center and the Durham Police Department.

One place that Duke fell short until the fall of 2003 was in its sexual misconduct policy, which students complained was vague and ineffective. Consisting of only two short paragraphs, the old policy emphasized assault but did not address what constitutes consent. Members of Duke's Undergraduate Judicial Board found it difficult to apply imprecise, legally confounding jargon to complicated, real-life cases.

Tracy Johnson* found this out the hard way. The daughter of an alumnus, Johnson grew up loving everything Duke represented. Before she matriculated, the Virginia native viewed Duke as "an incredibly healthy, happy place, where there was a sense of camaraderie and fun."

That changed her first week on campus. As first-year students living on East Campus have been doing for decades, Johnson and a group of other first-year women went to one of the West Campus parties that mark the social launch of the academic year. (Although Duke's alcohol policy prohibits underage drinking, students say that it is very easy to find alcohol on campus, even on all-freshman East.) The group went to several parties before winding up in the commons room of a fraternity. In retrospect, she acknowledges, she should have seen the warning signs: the young men who weren't drinking themselves but were eager to give free booze--high-proof Everclear punch--to the young women in attendance.