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Nowhere is it building faster than at Carleton College, Minnesota's prestigious private liberal-arts school and, in 1983, one of the first in the nation to establish a sexual-harassment policy. In the language of the university's judicial code, "rape" doesn't officially exist. School administrators call it "sexual harassment" or "advances without sanction." But those phrases don't seem very useful when Julie, Amy, Kristene and Karen try to describe what happened to them.
In October 1987, Amy had been on campus just five weeks when she joined some friends to watch a video in the room of a senior. One by one the other students went away, leaving her alone with a student whose full name she didn't even know. "It ended up with his hands around my throat," she recalls. In a lawsuit she has filed against the college, she charges that he locked the door and raped her again and again for the next four hours. "I didn't want him to kill me. I just kept trying not to cry." Only afterward did he tell her, almost defiantly, his name. It was near the top of the "castration list" posted on women's bathroom walls around campus to warn other students about college rapists.
Amy went to the dean of students, whom she had been told she could trust. "He told me it was my word against my attacker's, and that if I went for a criminal prosecution, the victim was basically put on trial." So instead she picked the gentler alternative -- an internal review, at which she ended up being grilled about her sexual habits and experiences. Her attacker was found guilty of sexual assault but was only suspended, because of a dean's assurance that he had no "priors" other than "advances without sanction."
Julie started dating a fellow cast member in a Carleton play. They had never slept together, she charges in a civil suit, until he came to her dorm room one night, uninvited, and raped her. Weeks later, she says, he ripped her dress at a play rehearsal and grabbed her exposed breast. Still she told no one. "If I had been raped by a stranger, I would have told someone. But to be raped by a friend -- I began to wonder, Whom do you trust?" She struggled to hold her life and education together, but finally could manage no longer and left school. Only later did Julie learn that her assailant was the same man who had attacked Amy.
Two other students, Kristene and Karen, claim to have suffered similar experiences at the hands of another student; all four of the Carleton women have filed suit against the college. They claim the school knew these men had a history of sexual abuse and did nothing to prevent their attacking again. Even after the men were found guilty of sexual harassment, they were allowed to remain on campus, and the victims were barred from warning their dorm mates under the college's privacy policy. The local police chief says that in the past six years, no Carleton official has brought an assault victim to the department.