A college campus isn't the first place that comes to mind in a discussion about violent crime.
But research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1 out of 5 college women will be sexually assaulted. NPR's investigative unit teamed up with journalists at the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) to look at the failure of schools — and the government agency that oversees them — to prevent these assaults and then to resolve these cases.
A Hidden Attack
When a woman is sexually assaulted on a college campus, her most common reaction is to keep it quiet. Laura Dunn says she stayed quiet about what happened in April 2004 at the end of her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin.
"I always thought that rape was when someone got attacked by a stranger and you had to fight back," she says.
That night, Dunn was drinking so many raspberry vodkas that they cut her off at a frat house party. Still, she knew and trusted the two men who took her back to a house for what she thought was a quick stop before the next party. Instead, she says they raped her as she passed in and out of consciousness.
For a long time, she had a hard time even letting herself call it a rape. It just didn't make sense with the way she saw her life.--

Okay, hold the phone. Sorry, (and I'll probably catch an unmitigated amount of flak for saying this,) but what this young woman is describing (which I first heard on NPR,) isn't rape. At least I don't see it as such. You're right, Laura, rape is when someone gets attacked (whether or not it's a stranger is frequently irrelevant, there's still a bodily violation involved,) and has to fight back. Nobody ever said anything about a person having gotten so drunk that she got cut off at a frat house, of all places, the collegiate Pantheons of high drinking art. The way I see it, if you get that drunk, you have effectively relenquished any control you have over what happens to you until the hangover goes away. "As she passed in and out of consciousness?!" Am I supposed to be able to summon up sympathy for this woman at this point?! And NPR basically attempted to paint this woman's picture with the same brush as a woman who was sleeping in her bed at another university and was raped and strangled to death by a stranger. That's heinous. That's wrong. But it also said that the man who raped this woman entered through an open window, and also made no mention of her sleeping off a good drunk. What exactly is your expectation when you go to a frat house and have that much to drink? Never mind the idea that if Laura had made the choice to attempt to drive home that night, the consequences could have conceivably been no less life-altering, and not just for her. At least someone else had the presence of mind not to let that happen.

And to answer what is probably the unspoken question in the minds of many, yes, if my daughters ever found themselves in the situation where they were in college, and sexually assaulted after having drank so much that they were going in and out of consciousness, I would be angry that they had been violated, but they'd still get one hellacious tongue-lashing from dad about having been that drunk in the first place. Let's face it, frat boys almost as a rule are hell-and-gone from being saints in the first place, did anybody really figure this situation was gonna end well? And Laura's story above continues by talking about her boyfriend of four years, and how they were going to get married, blah, blah, blah.....WHERE THE HELL WAS HE?! If he had that much interest in this woman, he should have been there, seeing to it that something like this didn't happen! Sorry, overall, you can tag a woman like this as a "victim" as much as you want, I ain't buying it.

Should universities be more tightly controlled to make sure attacks, even like the ones described above, don't happen? Ideally, yes. But long-term, universities aren't going to have any more money than any other entities for things like tighter policing of student activities. And it's still going to come down to the same thing it always has; the students using common sense.