The vagueness of Lizzie Breyer's report of the sexual assault on campus ("Student Reports Sexual Assault on Campus," Monday, March 25) is disturbing.
There are several events that Breyer fails to address and a perpetrator who is given no description, sex or otherwise.
Breyer states that the young woman was "forced to the ground" and then "reported waking up about an hour later covered with scratches and bruises and that she had been 'clearly sexually assaulted.'"
What goes unsaid is that the young woman was knocked unconscious for an hour, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted and that this was done by a man. (The order in which all of this occurred is unclear.) There is no room in reporting crimes of this nature for inferences and assumptions.
The acts need to be named, and the violence has to be attached with the perpetrator. By failing to name and give meaning to the sex of the perpetrator and all of the different forms of violence that occurred in this crime readers, men and women can avoid looking at this heinous crime as an assault committed by a man against a woman.
What we need to be addressing here in terms of sexual assault on this campus is men's violence against women, not the "buddy system," and how women and men can work to stop it.
Leah Perkinson
Junior
