Susan, now 22 and a college senior, was raped almost three years ago on a first date. She met the man in a cafeteria at summer school and went to his dorm that evening to watch television news and get acquainted. After 45 minutes of chitchat about national affairs, he began pawing and kissing her, ignoring her pleas to stop. "You really don't want me to stop," he said, and forced her to have sex.
The attack was an all too familiar incident of date rape. Like many victims, Susan was unwary and alone too soon with a man she barely knew. It took her 18 months to confront the reality that she had, in fact, been raped. Now she is more aware, and her thoughts run to the dangers of dates between women raised to be politely passive and aggressive males who sometimes assume that no means yes. "Women are taught to be nice, to be attractive and appealing," she says, "but we should also teach women to speak up more and teach men to listen more."
+ Date rape, according to some researchers, is a major social problem, so far studied mostly through surveys of college students. In a three-year study of 6,200 male and female students on 32 campuses, Kent State Psychologist Mary Koss found that 15% of all women reported experiences that met legal definitions of forcible rape. More than half those cases were date rapes. Andrea Parrot, a lecturer at Cornell University, estimates that 20% of college women at two campuses she surveyed had been forced into sex during their college years or before, and most of these incidents were date rapes. The number of forcible rapes reported each year -- 87,340 in 1985 -- is believed to be about half the total actually committed. Experts say the victim knows the assailant in at least a third of all rapes. Says Koss: "You're a lot more likely to be raped by a date than by a stranger jumping out of the bushes."
Acquaintance rapes are not always reported because many victims do not define themselves as having been raped. Koss found that 73% of the women forced into sex avoided using the term rape to describe their experiences, and only 5% reported the incident to police. Psychologist Barry Burkhart of Auburn University explains, "Because it is such a paralyzing event, so outside the realm of normal events, they literally don't know what happened to them."
Date rape sometimes occurs after the victim has taken drugs or one drink too many. Whether under the influence or not, victims frequently classify the rape as a hazy, regrettable experience that was somehow their own fault. "And because often they don't even see it as rape, they fail to seek support professionally," says Burkhart. "They are left without a way of understanding it, so they bury it, feeling guilty and ashamed."
The use of drugs or alcohol is likely to cloud the issue of consent in a criminal trial. Says Linda Fairstein, a Manhattan district attorney in charge of the sex-crimes unit: "The defense will say she gave consent and just doesn't remember."