Universities have always been America's approximate monasteries, embracing codes of behavior too stringent for the outside world. Deans aim to enforce a set of rules that will guide young people from the safety of their family to the freedom of the rest of their life. Some students arrive barely knowing how to drink and sleep, much less drink and sleep together; they have little sense of what is appropriate and what is expected of them. So with a pitcher of beer in one hand and a dorm key in the other, society's children set out to discover who they are.
What many learn first is that within a cloistered courtyard, rape is an easy crime: doors are left unlocked, visitors come and go, and female students give classmates the benefit of the doubt. College officials have led the effort to raise consciousness about the problem through rape-awareness weeks, video series, pamphlets, training manuals and posters: DATE RAPE IS VIOLENCE, NOT A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION. But when a really nasty incident occurs, the instinct too often is to handle it quietly and try to make it go away.
Katie Koestner was a virgin when she was allegedly raped by a student she had been dating at William and Mary College. The dean took her to the campus police, but steered her away from the outside authorities, she says. When she asked for an internal investigation, the accused man got to question her first, and then she had her turn. At 2:30 a.m., after 7 1/2 hours, he was found guilty of sexual assault. Days later she learned his penalty: he was barred from entering any dorm or fraternity house other than his own for four years, but he was allowed to stay on campus. "The hearing officer told me that this is an educational institution, not a penitentiary," she recalls. "He even said, 'Maybe you guys can get back together next year.' I couldn't believe it."
The man later wrote in the campus newspaper that he had suffered the "terrible consequences of being falsely accused." He said he had been dating Koestner for three weeks; one night they slept together, without having sex, and then early the next morning, "without any protest or argument on the part of Ms. Koestner, we engaged in intercourse." He was found guilty, he said, not for physically forcing Koestner to have sex, but for applying emotional pressure.
The debate grew more heated when Koestner went public with her story. Since then she has received stacks of letters and calls of support. Women raped decades ago phone and thank her for saving their daughters. Though the school defends its procedures, vice president W. Samuel Sadler says that "Katie's / coming forward has personalized the issue and led to a more intensive discussion, and frankly improved input."
That discussion goes on at colleges everywhere. "It seems like date and acquaintance rape is the rule rather than the exception on campuses today," says Frank Carrington, a consultant for Security on Campus, a nonprofit group based in Gulph Mills, Pa. "And the way the universities treat it is to cover up and protect their image while a tremendous outrage is building."