The story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia has raised a lot of issues. One is what educators call, ‘a teachable moment.’
Katrina Powell is Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech and Associate Professor of English.
"We’ve been teaching these issues and talking about these issues with students for a long time. In fact, women’s and gender studies as a field was founded in part to try to raise awareness of these kinds of issues."
Powell says not only have academic departments been tackling these issues, so have universities. Virginia Tech approved a new Master’s degree program in Women's and Gender Studies at its Board of Visitors meeting last month. It’s now waiting for state approval. There are six professors in the undergrad program and more than that, who teach the topic in their departments. And she says, students who don’t choose to major can take classes in it to fulfill their general education requirements. All this gives students exposure to this often-confusing topic.
"What we often like to talk about in our courses are some of the more subtle issues, about so-called acquaintance or date rape and how they, as young people, can be active in making sure things like that don't happen; and what might be the social or political or environmental, behavioral conditions that would underlie those murkier waters."
One of the underlying issues some think could be a factor may be an, unintended consequence of policies that restrict drinking on campus.
"In other words, if young women want to go parties where there’s alcohol and generally speaking they do, then they have to leave the university," says Virginia Tech Sociology Professor Neal King, who points to research suggesting attempts to solve one problem, may be inadvertently causing another one.
"By essentially creating a situation where, if students want to join in the drinking parties, they have to leave the places where young women, mostly live, then they are inadvertently driving them into spaces and parties that are largely controlled by men."
King realizes this is a difficult idea as well, but he says it may be worth looking at ways to give women more control over the situations.
"Yeah, it’s an easy recommendation to make. Unfortunately it flies in the face of another compelling priority, which is to take a tough, strong stand against drinking."
But tough problems don’t often have easy solutions and King argues, maybe it’s time to take a hard look at past policies.
"Because 30 or 40 years of telling students that date rape is wrong, has gotten us not real far. For the 20 years that we were doing it between the early 70s and the early 90s, rates and sexual violence only went up --and they’ve gone down but because all rapes and crime have gone down. It doesn’t look like the campus policies we’ve been pursuing have had any positive effect. So I think where that leaves us is it’s time to try something new."
Virginia Tech Administrators are holding a town meeting on sexual assault Friday at 11 am in Burruss Hall on the Blacksburg campus.
