In 2009, 364 people were the victims of a robbery within Madison’s city limits, and 28 were forcibly raped. For a city of about 230,000, those numbers do not amount to a very high crime rate.
The idea of Madison as a crime-free haven, of course, is misguided. Unfortunate things happen downtown on a weekly basis. But rarely do the reactions to reports of crimes indict the victims instead of the suspects who allegedly committed the crime. A recent on-campus incident and the controversy surrounding it have exposed a disturbingly ignorant faction of the University of Wisconsin student body.
The conversation we should be having about the sexual assault committed in Witte Hall last semester and the months-long rash of muggings downtown, along with recent allegations of sexual assault against former Assistant Athletic Director John Chadima, should be the first opportunity for a serious conversation about these issues we’ve had since the reports of a rape at the Sigma Chi fraternity in 2009. They should be catalysts for UW students to find common cause to diminish all varieties of crime in the campus area.
Instead of learning from these incidents, however, some students have begun a push against the truth. The angry reactions to reports of the arrests in connection with the Witte Hall assault show one of the worst sides of the entire student body, despite a significant effort to counter the vitriol.
This has been been most evident in the comments section from The Badger Herald’s Feb. 8 story about the arrest of three UW students in connection with the Witte Hall sexual assault. Although comment sections often are maligned for being supersaturated with trolls, they appear below widely-read stories and often provide insight into what readers are thinking – or not thinking – about a story. One notably incoherent commenter on the Witte Hall story who appears to be a UW student summed up the general theme of some of the most reprehensible reactions to the news.
“This is very annoying because I know these boys and they wouldn’t hurt a fly what is ‘second degree sexual assault’ really…both sides of the story need to be looked at…look at the word ‘allegedly’ not saying I don’t feel bad for the girl, but she also didn’t go to UW…what was she doing in witte anyways if she doesn’t go here…”
UW students are, at least theoretically, better than this. This reaction’s reasoning assumes that Witte Hall is the location of uncountable sexual assaults, that the victim should have known better than to enter such a dangerous building, and that the Herald acted irresponsibly for ever publishing that the three men were arrested for the assault. All three assumptions are inaccurate.
Just like any other suspect in a sexual assault, the arrested students, Brian Allen, Prentice Williams and Bruce Beckley, cannot avoid the media attention that inevitably follows a significant on-campus crime. The press has a responsibility to cover their arrests, especially considering the crime’s serious nature and the attention the police evidently have granted to the case. Their side of the story will come out in court, just like every other criminal case, and the press also has a responsibility to cover those proceedings.
Does all of this sound familiar? It should. These are basic lessons of the judicial process that even middle school students learn.
Readers already should know that Allen, Williams and Beckley currently are assumed not to have committed the assault – the press simply report that they were arrested. There’s no such thing as an “alleged arrest.” The arrest happened. They have been charged with a crime. Those are facts. Due process will help ensure they either are found guilty or not guilty of the assault.
Even worse, reacting to the arrests of UW students by attacking the victim of the assault, who certainly feels a sharper pain than whoever assaulted her, only further endangers the climate for reporting assaults or more serious crimes that happen among students. Just look at Sunday’s Lake Street mugging for proof of what a positive climate for reporting assaults can help investigators accomplish.
I still have not seen anyone remark that they believe the victim of the mugging faked the injuries they sustained during a beating, nor have I heard any similar claims related to last month’s mugging on Broom Street that left the victim in the hospital with facial injuries. After more than two years in Madison, I’ve noticed an immediate sympathy for the victims of robberies and a parallel immediate skepticism of the victims of a sexual assault. If police had arrested the three students for a mugging instead of a sexual assault, I doubt the backlash would have been as strong.
This problem isn’t confined to Madison – at least our reaction to the Chadima scandal has indicated a more reasoned approach to sexual assault controversy than that of our friends at Penn State. Are we really that different from the Penn State students who rioted when Joe Paterno was fired, though? Diminishing the character of a crime’s victim only will make the resolution of downtown’s crime problems more difficult.
The unfolding of the Chadima and Witte Hall cases have been difficult to witness for the last few weeks. If Chadima and the three accused students face graver consequences for the crimes they are accused of committing, I worry about the morale of the UW community after what already has been a difficult year; the current climate for victims of these crimes weakens morale and unity severely.
