A failure to care for sexually assaulted students

I have never been raped. I cannot know what it would be like to find myself alone with a man, to realize he is forcing himself upon me. I cannot imagine the terror of trying to fight him off. I cannot fathom what I would do once it was over.

We don't talk much about rape at Princeton. Twenty percent of college students in America have been sexually assaulted. At Princeton, .6 percent of students say they have been raped. I would like to believe that our figure is so much lower because our campus is idyllic, perfect, the exception to the rule. I would like to believe that sexual assault, like eating disorders, depression and a host of other problems we read about in explanatory pamphlets, plague other people on other campuses, people not equipped to handle the rush of classes, parties, practices, meals and meetings we are. Certainly, this is what the University seems to believe.

The one sexual assault issue being talked about on campus today is the rape kit, materials designed to collect physical evidence after an assault, and the discussion is hardly encouraging. Princeton has no rape kit on campus. If a woman decides to report an assault, she must travel more than forty minutes to New Brunswick. Implementing a kit at Princeton would be expensive. Nurses would have to be trained, certified and paid to be on call 24 hours a day. Technologically advanced medical equipment would have to be purchased. Until recently, University officials have deemed the project not worth the money.

But this is not an issue about dollars and cents. It is about priorities. A woman who is raped on campus should not have to get in a stranger's car and sit in traffic on Rt. 1 North for an hour to ensure that she can take action against her assailant. Any discussion of budgetary concerns or deferring the issue, particularly at a school with an endowment as large as ours, is unseemly.

The University seems finally to be catching on to the fact that we are behind every other Ivy League school, none of which are more than 10 minutes from a rape kit. Health Services requested funds for rape kit implementation for the first time this year. The University Budget Committee will review the request next month, and it will come before President Tilghman for approval in January. As a leader who has done so much for women on this campus, it will ultimately be her decision to provide victims of sexual assault with the options they should have had all along.

Undergraduates must step up to the plate and demand that the funding for a rape kit be approved. We must also realize that we let the University sweep issues of sexual violence under the rug when we accept a .6 percent assault rate as fact or fail to become informed about the options available to victims and whether they are adequate. Rape is a subject we would prefer to avoid. It is embarrassing, dirty, inappropriate. It is confusing. Who is at fault? What if they were drinking? What if its her word against his? It would be easier for all of us to just ignore the fact that sexual assault happens on campus, and, up until now, that is largely what we have done. And that works for us, until we have a friend who is assaulted, or know someone who commits a drunken date rape, or find ourselves alone, terrified, fighting someone off. All of which is to say, ignoring sexual assault does not work at all.

There are plenty of people on campus, from the remarkable director of SHARE to the McCosh peer educators to concerned friends and professors, who care about these issues. But their panels and pamphlets will never be enough if the University administration and the student body cannot come together in acknowledgement that sexual violence happens here, as it does everywhere, and that we must do everything we can not only to stop it but to facilitate reporting and recovery for victims. I have never been raped. I hope I never will be. But when it comes to rape, I, like all of us, can do much more than hope.

Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills, N.J.