Editor’s note: the following is an account of sexual assault, and may trigger an emotional response from some readers. The letter is written by a former UW-Madison student and Daily Cardinal staff member. The name was changed at the author’s request.
I looked down and all I could see were pink, fuzzy blurs.
They were my socks. The only thing still left on my body. They were the socks my ex-boyfriend had given me for Valentine’s Day the year before. Hideous things. But hell, they kept my feet warm on cold Madison nights. So I wore them out to the bar underneath my boots.
I looked left. There was a belt on the floor. Not mine. I looked up. The door was wide open. I looked down. An unstrapped bra. Unzipped pants. Both mine. And then, pain. I screamed.
My roommates, my best friends in college, woke up and called the police. The next thing I knew, two officers, one male and one female were questioning me in my room.
They would have to confiscate almost everything in my room for evidence, they said. Never to be returned unless I formally filed a suit against my perpetrator. My comforter, my sheets, my pillows, my jeans and shirts, and even my pink fuzzy socks—they took it all. Damn it, I miss those socks. My room was stripped bare.
What happened next seems eerily familiar to the account written by Angie Epifano from Amherst College last week. Her anecdote quickly spread across the Internet, causing uproar among students and staff at her own college, but also among thousands of others around the country who caught a glimpse into the life of someone who had been raped.
My rape incident happened to me in the least expected of places—at UW-Madison, a university that I had grown to call home. It happened in my apartment—a place I had lived comfortably for three years. It is true what they say. You never think it is going to happen to you until it does. And then, it is all you can think about. Sometimes for weeks, or in my case, for months.
I do not have the exact same story as Angie, but I share her frustration. The interactions Angie had with campus officials and police officers at Amherst match those I had at UW-Madison. Coincidentally, Biddy Martin was my chancellor at UW-Madison when I was raped, and now presides as president at Amherst College.
I was taken by the police officers to the Emergency Room at Meriter Hospital on the outskirts of campus. I waited several hours for the nurses to take me to the exam room where they performed a Rape kit. It was during these hours that my roommates had to call my mother, who happened to be in Chicago that weekend, to rent a car and drive to Madison.
After returning to my apartment room on Gorham, where I slept on a bare mattress, I had to decide what I was going to do. Would I file a complaint? Or would I just let it pass?
The detective called me the next day. She said she was going to talk to the boy who I thought was my perpetrator. I didn’t go to class that day. I waited by the phone. I wondered what he would say. Would he admit it? Would he be taken to jail?
Finally. She called back.
“I talked to him,” she said. “He said you had been drinking that night at the bar.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I am over the age of 21 and I was at a bar. I had a few drinks.”
“He seemed to be really upset about the matter,” the officer said. “He said he heard you say ‘stop’ but didn’t know that you actually wanted him to stop.”
Oh great, he feels bad. That makes everything better. And what the hell else does stop mean, then? I thought.
“So, where do we go from here?” I asked the officer.
“Well it seems like this is all I can do from my end. If you want to file a formal complaint you will have to do it through the police department on campus.”
The next day I went to visit counselors on campus who work with victims of sexual assault. I had launched a series on the crime for The Daily Cardinal during my time at the paper, and had spoken with several of these women for interviews before. I trusted them. But when I walked into the room, I felt anything but comfortable.
A woman sat across a long table from me. A box of tissues separated us. She began to speak. It was almost like a speech. She didn’t even look me in the eye. She encouraged me not to proceed with the trial because it was my senior year, and would I really want to spend it in a courtroom? And besides, she said, the DA rarely picks up these cases unless there is enough evidence. And it is just going to be my word against his. And who knows how that would turn out, she said.
It was during this time of vulnerability, the first few days after being raped, that I needed support from university counselors and officials. But instead, I was deterred from going back to the counselors, and from filing a formal complaint. I have spent almost every day since wishing that I had.
But it was easier then to push it aside then. It was midterms. And I needed to focus on school. I needed to find a job for after graduation. And I needed to buy some new socks. (I bought purple fuzzy ones the next day).
In 2010 the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism assembled a website documenting and analyzing sexual assault numbers throughout the UW System. According to its report, national research suggests there may be about 750 rapes or attempted rapes a year at a school the size of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with about 21,600 women. But according to the UW-Madison 2010 Campus Crime Statistics, the university had a reported 16 forcible sex offenses on campus that year.
It is a well-known fact that sexual assaults are one of the most underreported crimes in the nation. And I contributed to that trend. But I never thought that university officials, or police officers, would play a part in that process. I never thought they would play a part in that discouragement. I wish every day that I had reported the crime formally. Maybe my report would have strengthened the fight against sexual assault and rape, at least on the UW-Madison campus.
I have spent the last two years pushing my rape to the side and pretending that it didn’t happen. It was easier to focus on my career, and to move on as quickly as possible from that pain. Until I read Angie’s testimony, I never had any intention of speaking up about what happened to me at Madison. But for one reason or another, Angie’s words motivated me to speak up about sexual assault at UW-Madison—a campus that has experienced at least one high-profile case of rape within the past five years.
What I know is that rape happens every day to both men and women around the world. I recently moved back from overseas where I heard testimonies of heinous sexual assault and rape. My story barely compares to these. But rape is rape. And no matter what way we put it, rape matters. It should matter to universities like UW-Madison. It should matter to university officials that students on campus understand how widespread the issue actually is. And how often that statistic is distorted.
University officials need to do more to help victims of rape on campus. They need to provide services that will allow victims to choose which path to take—to file a complaint, or to stay silent. Whatever the choice, it should be the victim’s, not the university’s.
Please send feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
Update: Dean of Student Lori Berquam, UWPD Chief Susan Riseling and UHS Director Sarah Van Orman posted the following response to the article on the university's website: http://www.news.wisc.edu/21192
