TO THE EDITOR:
In yesterday’s article “Lack Of Rape Alerts Draws Complaints” I was concerned by some comments made by Department of Public Safety chief Jeff McCracken about the campus community’s “need to know (about) possible threats.”
According to McCracken, if this rape were an isolated incident or a case of acquaintance rape, then it would not qualify as the type of ongoing threat required in order to justify reporting it to the campus community.
Can rape ever truly be an isolated incident? If the attacker were hit with a sudden desire to rape out of nowhere and acted on it, perhaps it would be isolated, but this ignores the societal causal factors that contribute to rape as the cultural phenomenon it is today.
Even if this isolated, on-a-whim theory were still feasible, what evidence would we have that it wouldn’t happen on a whim again tomorrow?
Both because of the causal factors (which the isolation theory ignores) and our inability to know how it won’t happen again, I think it is dangerous to assume these cases are isolated incidents until proven otherwise.
As for the acquaintance concern, I don’t understand what difference it would make whether or not the victim knew her attacker or not. I’m sure he knows other people, and this certainly doesn’t change the nature of the crime.
To assert that the general community should not be concerned because the attacker knew the other person is to assert that something about their relationship was the cause of the rape, which is a slippery slope to victim-blaming, ignoring the real roots of the problem.
J.J. Lang ’12
Philosophy
