Rape and Guns: Messy Campus Debates
Imagine walking into a room full of young and beautiful college girls getting ready for a campus party. Let’s say there are eight of them — they are laughing, discussing boys, doing their make-up hair, and gossiping. They are enjoying the best years of their lives. Who does not like parties when you are in your early twenties? Alcohol, flirting, fun. Everyone is having a good time, right? Now imagine what can happen next: two of those eight girls experience sexual assault that night. The traumatizing experience haunts them for the rest of their lives.
One in four women is exposed to rape once in her lifetime. One in two women undergoes some form of unwanted sexual activity. Female college students are the most vulnerable group for sexual assault and rape: nearly half of all college women experience a form of sexual victimization. What makes these rates even more alarming is the reality of broad underreporting and low numbers of official criminal reports and arrests.
Despite the widespread assumption, rape does not necessarily involve the use of violent physical force. Rape can result from incapacitation: in this case, a victim is too intoxicated to express consent to sex [1]. “Substance facilitated rape” is the term used to describe sexual assault under the influence of alcohol, a frequent occurrence on college campuses. What are the consequences? The majority of victims describe symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Victims’ responses differ in accordance with various pre-rape factors, use of force during rape, or non-consent voicing [1]. What cannot be disputed here is this: behind those detached, dry, absolutely emotionless terms (substance facilitated rape, PTSD) is severe distress in which the victim experiences both physical and psychological pain, heavy guilt, paralyzing fear, terrifying flashbacks, sleep and eating disorders, long-lasting anxiety, and depression.
The problem is extremely common on U.S. colleges and university campuses. With more rapes occurring, more discussions are taking place. Yet not all of them seem to positively contribute to effective solutions. One of the suggestions for students’ protection is to be armed: the belief concealed guns on campus can assist in the reduction of rape crimes. Students for Concealed Carry (SCC) is one of the nation’s largest groups pushing for guns on campus [2]. In twenty-three U.S. states, the decision on whether to allow or ban concealed guns on campuses is left to colleges and universities [3]. Overall, more than two hundred American college campuses across those states allow students to possess concealed weapons on campus [2].
Gun control is probably the most debated and polarizing issue in the U.S. Yet with its entrance into on-campus sexual assault discussions it undoubtedly gets worse and more dangerous. It also gets much messier. The Research in Higher Education Journal shows the presence of a double risk environment from concealed guns being allowed on campus. Mixing guns with intoxication increases the chances of both sexual assaults and shootings (accidental and deliberate) to occur [2].
With allowed concealed weapons on campus, it is women who become exposed to greater risk: the research demonstrates that the profile of a potential man assaulting women follows the profile of men most likely to be college gun-owners. Moreover, statistics show in eighty percent of rape cases the victim knows the perpetrator (friends, acquaintances, intimate partners) and most of sexual assaults on campus start with some sort of consensual behaviour (such as, for example, flirting) — all these factors make use of a gun for self-protection extremely difficult. The research is convincing in one more aspect of the issue: the intended victim is highly unlikely to be armed during the assault. More frequently, only the victims assaulted previously tend to be prepared to protect themselves [2].
The trends observed in the research (data gathered from fifty-four colleges and universities) very clearly demonstrate that the changes to permitting concealed guns on campus are not followed by decreasing numbers in sexual assaults. In fact, it is the other way around: a significant increase in on-campus crime rates takes place once the students were allowed to carry guns [2].
A terrifying number of women suffer from sexual assault and severe consequential distress on campus. The experience haunts them for the rest of their lives. And although on-campus sexual assault is an extremely urgent issue to address today, introducing guns as a solution is not a way out. Violence can never be treated with more violence, which guns are a source of. Sexual assaults can be eliminated if people loudly raise the issue. This is the only path transforming the way society functions. For more insight into the debate, read Biastro A. Leslie, Larwin H. Karen, Carano E. Marla’s article “Arming the Academy: How Carry-on-campus Impact Incidence of Reported Sexual Assault Crimes.”
Support the protest against arming on-campus students and join the Campaign to Keep Guns off Campus today — https://keepgunsoffcampus.org/.
References:
[1] Cook K. Natalie “I Said No: the Impact of Voicing Non-Consent on Women’s Perceptions of and Responses To Rape”. Thesis, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 2015. Accessed November 1st, 2018. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/003e/1e1f477ac2971462140a3261151c766e4c4d.pdf
[2] Biastro A. Leslie, Larwin H. Karen, Carano E. Marla “Arming the Academy: How Carry-on-campus Impact Incidence of Reported Sexual Assault Crimes”. The Research in Higher Education Journal. Accessed November 2nd, 2018. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1148907.pdf
[3] “Guns on Campus: Overview”. National Conference of State Legislatures. August 14th, 2018. Accessed November 1st, 2018. http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/guns-on-campus-overview.aspx
