Sarah Blugis, a sophomore majoring in political communication, is a Hatchet columnist.
I don’t usually read the blog Total Sorority Move.
But when the post “34 Signs You Went to a City College” – with lines like “not only do you have to deal with annoying student organizations, you have to deal with homeless people” – bounced around GW students’ Facebook feeds last week, I wanted to learn more about the popular site.
It didn’t take me long to find a post that had me even more disgusted. By a former GW student, no less.
College girls should stop pretending that they were raped, wrote Catie Warren – who nicknamed herself “From Rush to Rehab” – in a post called “Stop Crying Rape.” If a woman is drunk and is sexually assaulted, apparently it’s her fault.
The post focuses on the idea that any girl who drinks too much should accept the risk of being sexually assaulted. Warren claims that girls regret having sex and then use rape as a method of avoiding responsibility.
“Faced with our poor decisions from the night before,” she explains, “we had no excuse but to take them all back. After all, that’s what all of the flyers and the seminars and the PSAs said.”
Of course, everyone makes mistakes. It happens. Sober, drunk or anything in between, most college students can relate to regretting a hook-up the night before. But there is a fundamental difference between regret and rape.
Warren seems to be under the impression that every Saturday morning at GW, groups of girls file into the UPD office to report their drunken hookups as rape. But as we can clearly see by the low number of sexual assaults actually reported, this is absolutely not the case.
Very few women would put themselves through the experience of reporting sexual violence just because they wish they hadn’t had sex with someone under the influence.
In reality, only 40 instances of rape out of every 100 will be reported to the police, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. Here at GW, just 17 sexual assaults have been reported on campus in the last four years.
This isn’t because sexual assault and rape isn’t occurring — it’s because disgraceful columns like this one embarrass women and trivialize what they’ve gone through.
Warren’s idea that women are running away from responsibility and accountability by reporting a rape is ridiculous. In fact, The Hatchet recently profiled the difficulties of GW’s hearing process, which is extremely taxing and challenging for survivors to go through.
As a culture, according to Warren, “we’re creating a mockery of the real victims of sexual assault, the ones who are violently attacked.” Who is she to decide who is a “real” victim of sexual assault?
Any woman has the right to get as intoxicated as she likes. Additionally, she has every right to go home with whomever she likes. But if she doesn’t consent or is too intoxicated to consent to sex, it’s rape.
Writing a column scolding drunk women for being raped isn’t feminism — it’s embarrassing, and we can do much better.