Due to the unprecedented nature of the current national dialogue on campus sexual assault, many assume it is a recent phenomenon. I have heard peers and parents ask the same questions: How did such a widespread problem get so out of control so quickly, and how did no one know what was happening?
The truth is that campus rape and other forms of sexual violence are not new problems. The tragedy of sexual assault at UNC has been 50 years in the making, and its student anti-rape movement has been active — in ebbs and flows — since the 1970s.
I was in my second year at UNC when the school began to make national headlines for its mishandling of sexual assault cases. As a student, I was deeply unsettled by the claims made by several students and an administrator. As an activist, I was proud to witness the protests and pushback that came in the wake of these controversies.
And as a history major, I suspected that this crisis did not emerge overnight. So I decided to undertake an honors thesis about the history of anti-rape activism at UNC.
My research focused on three waves of student activism and the University’s response. Each revealed that activists and administrators failed to adequately address campus rape because they tried to simplify an extremely complex problem.
Beginning in the 1960s, the proportion of women in the student body began to grow steadily. Throughout the decade, UNC governed them under the austere rules of in loco parentis. By emphasizing the danger of illicit sex to a woman’s reputation, administrators created a harmful tradition of silence surrounding assault.
In 1974, local activist Miriam Slifkin founded what is now the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. Its establishment began a discussion, but the sheltered environment of a college campus created a rhetoric at UNC that was based more on fear than fact.
Indeed, beginning with a 1974 slide presentation created by the Association for Women Students called “Lady Beware,” a theme of stranger rape and victim-blaming emerged within early rape awareness and prevention work. This often did more to perpetuate rape myths than to combat rape itself and prevented women from recognizing assaults by dates and acquaintances as legitimate forms of rape.
With the publication of an article in “Ms.” magazine in 1982, date rape finally became a topic of national conversation. Students began to develop new forms of activism, including peer education and victim support. Nonetheless, activists and administrators alike found the issue of date rape frustratingly ambiguous and therefore difficult to combat. They avoided confronting something as problematic and prevalent as date rape by focusing on the more easily defined issue of stranger rape.
