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Sexual assault and rape are serious social issues in the United States. Sexual assault can happen to anyone, regardless of age, gender, race, or sexual orientation; However, women are most commonly the victims of sexual assault. Many students in colleges don’t know the true meaning behind sexual assault, which increases the rates of college rape. Sexual assault is “any unwanted sexual act against a person or without a person’s consent—any sexual, physical verbal or visual act that forces a person against their will to have unwanted sexual contact or attention” (“Sexual Assault and Rape”). Many colleges disregard campus rapes in order to keep their reputation intact. Caroline Heldman discusses in her article how “no college in the U.S. has come up with a plan to effectively shift rape culture on their campus”. People need to start understanding that if this shift does not occur soon, we are putting girls all over the world in danger.

Rape is known to be the most common violent crime on American college campuses today. Rana Sampson goes into further detail in her article on how college years are the most vulnerable for women since “women ages 16 to 24 experience rape at rates four times higher than the assault rate of all women”. College women are more at risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault than women the same age, but not in college. Sampson state that it is estimated that almost 25 percent of college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. Many students in college experience rape but decide not to report it. Many victims think that their college will not do anything about it. Jed Rubenfeld explains that “because of low arrest and conviction rates, lack of confidentiality, and fear they won’t be believed, only a minuscule percentage of college women who are raped — perhaps only 5 percent or less — report the assault to the police. Research suggests that more than 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by a relatively small percentage of college men — possibly as few as 4 percent — who rape repeatedly, averaging six victims each. Yet, these serial rapists overwhelmingly remain at large, escaping serious punishment”. This raises the question of why should women feel confident enough to come forward about their sexual assault without reassurance that the state and college will correctly handle the situation?

One college that has been convicted of continuous mishandlings of sexual assault is Vanderbilt. Even though, Vanderbilt is known to be one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States. Recently, there was an ugly rape case involving their football team that just can’t get worse. On the second floor of the Gillette House dorm at Vanderbilt, there was a broken door that has been knocked off. When school officials checked the security cameras, they found one of their highly rated football players who just transferred, Brandon Vandenburg. Bobby Allyn published in 2013, only a few months after the initial assault and stated that “hat officials eventually discovered about the events of that night would lead to the indictment of four football players for rape and another for alleged involvement in a cover-up”. On a Saturday night in June, Vandenburg went out with a 21-year-old student from Oklahoma who he had been casually dating. When they both returned to Vandenburg’s dorm after a long night of drinking, the girl was seen to be completely unconscious. Vandenburg called down three of his teammates, Cory, Brandon, and JaBorian, to help him bring the girl into his room. Some time after, 4 football players entered the room; different objects were used to penetrate the victim. Vandenburg took pictures and videos on his phone, and sent the others the footage. This was used as the main component of evidence during the trial. Even though there is such a graphic video, the coach of the football team claims, that “people always speculate and gossip. There is no truth to that accusation whatsoever. It’s inflammatory” (Allyn). Vanderbilt has kept quiet about these accusations until further notice. They will do whatever they can in order to keep this story under wraps. Situations like this is exactly why women do not usually come forward.

Similarly, Emerson College’s handling of a student’s sexual assault case caused so much stress that the victim ended up in the hospital and eventually dropped out of school, a new lawsuit contends (Kingkade). In April 2012, Jillian Doherty had consensual sex with a male student, but declined when he requested anal sex, it was then that he choked her and forcibly penetrated her. Doherty reported the assault in March 2013, and concluded with a final hearing in May. At the hearing, Tyler Kingkade writes that “the accused ‘was allowed to present new evidence, a letter of character, from a fellow Emerson student, who had no involvement with the hearing, assault, or the investigation’, the suit claimed.” According to Doherty, she was not given an opportunity to view the letter. The suspect was found not responsible because both he and the victim admitted to have been drinking before the incident and the court ruled her statement “inconsistent”. As a result of the first hearing, Doherty told Huffington Post “It was just the worst feeling in the world knowing you’re telling the truth and no one believes you.” Doherty was granted an appeal in the summer of 2013, and a new hearing took place in October. After the second hearing, the accused was found responsible for the assault and was expelled from school. By the time the hearing was over, the damage has already been done. Doherty’s grades dropped she had chronic depression and PTSD. She began “an outpatient treatment program at Arbor Hospital to address the emotional distress from reporting her assault” (Kingkade). According to the lawsuit, she was not granted academic accommodations to do her class work from home during that time, and unfortunately had to leave Emerson in Spring 2014, which was her dream school. The suit against Emerson claims that they violated the campus safety law, the Clery Act, by underreporting the sexual assault. This further proves, that even with laws against sexual assault are in tact, colleges and the government are still not handling these situations correctly. All in all, Walt Bogdanich explains that “school disciplinary panels are a world unto themselves, operating in secret with scant accountability and limited protections for the accuser or the accused.”

The difference in the amount of people who do and do not report their sexual assault is overwhelming.About 80 percent of campus rapes are not reported to police, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report on sexual assault. Julia Glum states that “researchers found that 26 percent of students and 23 percent of non-students chose not to report their rapes because it was too personal to tell police. More non-students than students said they didn’t report the crime because, they believed, the police could not or would not do anything to help.” Victims most of the times feel like they do not have a voice after being sexually assaulted. Society needs to seem more open and understanding when a situation like rape arises. Many victims of rape blame themselves for what has happened to them. They usually put the blame on what they were wearing, what they drank, where they were, and the time of day etc. These victims have to understand that no one is perfect and they were in a situation that they could not have controlled. Rebecca Nagle, co-director of the Baltimore-based activist group FORCE, told International Business Times earlier this week “We live in a culture where survivors are taught … to doubt your experiences, We need to build a culture of support for survivors”. Sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. You deserve to feel safe and supported. From the perspective of a university administrator who is mostly concerned with his school’s reputation, a rape that goes unreported is a rape that never actually happened (Kitchener). This shows exactly why women do not report their assault, because of the clear mindset of a highly respected school administrator.

There are a couple of things we know for sure about rape on college campuses, but here are two: It happens, and universities lie about it (Stern). Many colleges decide to keep their rape victims in the shadow and will decide not to tell state police of what has happened. “’When it comes to sexual assault and rape, the norm for universities and colleges is to downplay the situation and the numbers’, researcher Corey Rayburn Yung, a law professor at the University of Kansas, said in a release’ (Timm). In 2006, Fox News reported that administrators at Eastern Michigan University covered up a rape and murder of a student, 22-year-old Laura Dickson, all while letting her parents think that she died of natural causes. Joseph Shapiro explains that, “despite federal laws created to protect students, colleges and universities have failed to protect women from this epidemic of sexual assault.” Colleges have a lot to lose when they admit to having a rape problem on campus. College codes and procedures were designed to punish for plagiarism and underage drinking, not to prove the crime of sexual assault. Many administrators use that excuse to justify them keeping the rape a secret. Many women face interrogations by administrators who do not seem to know what a rape exam is.

Many colleges will try to resolve the problem on their own. But, instead of making it better, they only make it worse. Last year, Bridgewater State University withheld the names of two men charged with rape on campus and did not notify any students or faculty about the incident. The school didn’t notify its 11-member board of trustees. Maria Papadopoulos quoted when Richard M. Freeland said, “Students and parents have a right to be concerned if they learn about such activity from the media, rather than from campus officials.” “O’Neill said withholding the names of accused rapists from a college community and the public is ‘ridiculous’ – and it shows that university officials are reluctant to be transparent about crimes reported on campus.”

In 2012 at Grinnell College, Emily Barlett received text messages from a guy “if you ever tell anyone God help you”, only ten minutes after he left her dorm room. That night, she told an advocate on campus that she was sexually assaulted. A few days later she went to campus security to file an official report. College administrators decided to set up a meditation session between the rapist and the victim, a practice the U.S. Department of Education prohibited a year before. The meditation was a failure because it re-traumatized the victim and didn’t bring a resolution to her case (Kingkade). She later took the case to a college court, where they found the accused not responsible for sexual misconduct, despite the photos of deep bruising on her body and the text message he sent the victim-threatening her if she told anyone about what had happened. “He was deemed responsible for “disorderly misconduct” and “psychological harm” and punished with a year of probation” (Kingkade). The accused was still allowed to play baseball and take the same courses as the victim. At Grinnell College, students were forced to attend class with men the school knew have sexually assaulted them. The college made the offenders write short apology letters to the victim.

Some women started to struggle in their classes due to stress related to their assaults, they say, the college decided to push them off campus. In many cases, the victim would be placed on academic suspension while the offender would be allowed to return to campus. When one of the professors at Grinnell told the administration office that a victim was placed right next to her offender, the college said there was nothing they could do about it. During one case at Grinell, the attacker landed an on campus job as the head of security, just after being accused. The way Grinell has handled their sexual assaults has driven two victims away from their dream school and caused daily anxiety for the third, who decided to stay on campus. The college constantly places the blame of them not doing anything about the accusations on the fact that it is a small campus. They believe that also because Grinell, Iowa is a small city, there isn’t any way for the victim and the attacker not to run into each other, so things at school cannot be any different than the two running into each other on the street. In 2013, almost a year after the assault, Emily Barlett decided to transfer to the University of Missouri. In 2014, Grinell sent Barlett a letter asking her to reconsider returning to the college, and had the indecency to ask her why she left. Another high profile case that occurred at Grinell, only a few months after Barletts initial assault. India Vannoy was assaulted by a classmate in her scholarship program. She filed school conduct charges against the male student, as did another women who was assaulted by the same man. The hearing occurred 5 months after the assault. Grinell found him to be responsible for psychological trauma in Vannoy’s case. He was suspended for a short 3 semesters before returning to campus. Vannoy was clinically diagnosed with PTSD and took the spring 2013 semester to recover. She returned in the fall, but landed on academic probation. Grinell promised to do anything to help her out during the ordeal, but Vannoy said that she did not receive any assistance. Instead, an administrator told her she was “mentally unstable” and suggested, “she take time off to get over it”. She was later placed on academic suspension, banning her from returning to campus; meaning that the attacker is allowed back on campus, but Vannoy is not.

The mishandling of sexual assaults led to a Senate report, it was found that 41% of schools conducted no investigation in the past 5 years, even though there were numerous complaints made by female students. Many women keep an assault a secret to prevent embarrassment, shame and the trauma of reliving the nightmare during legal proceedings. Some administrators care less about the victim, and more about their own image. Schools are terrified of the result if the world hears that such an awful crime has been committed on their campus. Colleges fear that any negative publicity will ruin their sterling reputations, which will result in diminished enrollment applications (Jarrett). Colleges need to step out of their own alternative world, and step back into reality. Gregg Gregg Jarrett explains that “these cases reveal an unsettling fact: many colleges are dilatory or derelict in failing to prevent attacks. Once they do occur, campus investigations have proven to be scant, shoddy and incompetent. All too often, complaints are brushed aside; local police are kept in the dark, survivors are encouraged to drop it and crimes are covered up. The alleged victim is victimized all over again.” Colleges will not change their course of action unless they are forced to do so. Until then, not much will be done about correctly handling a campus rape.

Since all of these mishandlings of sexual assault cases, the government was forced to make laws in order to prevent colleges from mishandling rape. A few of them are: “Yes Means Yes”, “Title IX”, and “It’s On Us”. “Governor Jerry Brown of California signed Senate Bill 967, nationally known as the “Yes Means Yes” bill, into action on September 28” (Hwang). The “Yes Means Yes” bill aims to provide help for victims of sexual assault on college campuses. This bill requires colleges to define affirmative consent as a clear “yes” rather than the absence of a verbal “no”. Additionally, the bill mandates that colleges educate their students on consent and sexual assault in order to prevent further rapes (Hwang). Senator Kevin de Leon of California said in a speech “our sisters, our daughters, our nieces — every woman deserves the right to pursue the dream of higher education without being threatened by the nightmare of violence and sexual abuse.” The bill also provides multiple resources funded by the state in which victims can use to assist them in the legal process of reporting, investigating and finalizing the case. Unfortunately, as of now the bill has only been passed in California. Officials are working to pursue this bill across America. Even “President Obama decided to join Vice President Biden and American people across the country to launch the “It’s On Us” initiative- an awareness campaign to help put an end to sexual assaults on college campuses” (Somanader). “It’s On Us” asks everyone, both men and women to make a personal commitment to step off the sidelines and be a part of the mission to end the epidemic of college rape. This bill sends guidance to every school that receives federal funding on their legal obligations to prevent and to deal with sexual assaults that occur on their campuses. Adding onto the bill, Obama created the “White House task force” to protect students from sexual assault to work with colleges on developing the best practices on how to prevent and deal with sexual assault. “Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal funding” (“What is Title IX”). Even a single instance of rape or sexual assault by another student or staff member could meet the standards of getting the victim justice.

The “Yes Means Yes”, “Title IX”, and “It’s On Us” bills do not implement a transfer of power between the victim and the rapist, as they aim to give victims a fighting chance (Hwang). Sarah Yang said, “It takes a lot of strength to report in the first place, and having to deal with an administrator that doesn’t understand the whole situation is very difficult.” Many of these bills will continue to arise due to this continuously rising problem of sexual assault, giving the universities more incentive and pressure to find more evidence in reports where there is none.

College rape has been and will continue to be a huge problem around the world if people do not make an effort to put an end to it. Many colleges have experienced handling huge rape cases such as: Vanderbilt, Emerson and Grinnell. College Rape is an important topic to be educated on because many students reading this will soon be attending or are already attending college and need to know about the different ways you could get help if you are sexually assaulted. Since this is such a huge problem in many colleges today it is important for everyone to know what you could do in order to help prevent future campus rapes.

While reading any text, every reader yearns for understanding the same way a hungry person yearns for satisfaction while eating. There is no doubt that every reader will have a peculiar experience in the way they perceive the story at the end. A thought process, modeled by Little Red Schoolhouse follows the conceptualization of the intellectual problem; its costs and benefits and finally the solution to the problem. In a similar fashion, this critical analysis parses “Evidence” by Brent Edwards. The critical analysis dwells on the fact that the “Evidence” begins with a narration depicting a prison environment and only tells the reader why he is in prison in the first place at the end of the passage. Why the narrator is in prison forms an intellectual problem of this analysis and the costs and benefits of starting this way as well as the solution to the intellectual problem is adeptly analyzed.

It is said that the first sentence going into the first paragraph of any story speaks volumes to the reader; probably since, it can be projected what the story will be about. It is within this initial part of Evidence that I sought to retrieve the intellectual problem to be explored. An intellectual problem relates to the ambiguity in the text and yes, being in prison is a tension or ambiguity that not everyone will feel comfortable understanding why, in the first place, the author was apprehended.

Is it murder, robbery with violence, rape, civil case, treason or even a huge capital offense that the author was apprehended for? Thinking in this line not only motivates the reader to inquire more into the story by reading on and as they do so, answers start flowing in bit by bit until their intellectual problem is solved. Basically, answering the question why the author is in jail. The ambiguity of the story is rooted in the fact that everyone loves freedom and this freedom is only taken away in instances that contravened the law. The initial picture/image that gets painted in the mind of the reader is that, the author is a bad person and an effort to prove this or disapprove it all together is what drives the energy of reading and analyzing the text. Edwards disorients the reader in order to make them more intrigued in his story and to keep reading until they find out what caused him to be apprehended. Edwards brilliantly only allows the reader to understand why he was arrested in the last few paragraphs on the essay so that the reader has no choice, but to keep reading until their intellectual problem is solved.

The intellectual problem, in this case, relates to the title of the text, Evidence, which points to a possible scenario of evidence lapse, which led to the author’s apprehension. There is no doubt that prison and evidence belong to a similar class of jargon. While making an inquiry into this, the primary passage at the front for close reading is:

“The cell is four meters long and two meters wide. The walls and floor are lined with white tile, gleaming in the half- light. There is no furniture, but the far half of the floor is elevated, about a meter high-an abstraction of a bed, a chair, a table. The Judas hole in the steel cell door squints up at the barred window high on the opposite wall. There are eight of us. We lie down to sleep as best we can, four on the raised platform and four below, in an uncomfortable tangle of intimacy. Through the window, a hint of illumination: the gentle wash of moonlight over the streets of Dakar.” (P. 42)

In the above passage, the author descriptively shares from the first-hand experience how the prison cell looks like in Dakar. While sharing these descriptions, the reader’s mind is taken into a trance trying to imagine how, physically, the cell looks like. Before the reader can arrive at a more concrete vision of the prison cell, the intellectual problem begins to settle in the mind once again, thus the question: why is the author in prison? Within this passage, the author does not state or even hint as to what took him to prison cells. Failure to state the reason why he is in prison begs for a further probe in the reader’s mind thus formulating itself as the intellectual problem.

Even in the next few beginning paragraphs, the author still does not state the reason for being in prison. Edwards begins to simply talk about music and a guitarist. His main reason of discussing the musician is to explain that in the eyes of Dakar police, anything seems like a weapon, even something as harmless as a guitar. Dakar officers will without remorse beat and imprison anyone that might, even in the slightest, look like they could be a potential danger on the streets of Dakar. They do not seem to care about having any evidence or justification to make an arrest, and while doing so, harming the victim. While grasping for some words to understand why prison and how it is related with the musical descriptions in the subsequent paragraphs, the story wonders away as though prison was never mentioned in the first place and Evidence is not the title. The author introduces his relationship with Thierno and slowly the feeling of getting the solution starts to fade away as the descriptions of Thierno’s apartment begins to fill the vacuum of the staring intellectual problem. The passages that follow build up to describe how the author was arrested and taken into custody, but without providing an early clear reason as to why.

The organization of the story ends in a fashion that leaves the reader to decide whether the solution to the intellectual problem has been hit or not. In my case, the intellectual solution to the problem is given in the concluding paragraphs where prison is revisited and a more subtle explanation of why the author is in prison is outlined. The author was arrested in the dark streets of Dakar without any evidence that he was guilty. He was falsely convicted because he fought back against men who had no true identification that they were police. In the eyes of these men, Edwards was resisting authority, which in Dakar and anywhere else in the world is seen as a felony.

While the claim by the police that he lacked evidence to prove his harmlessness, the police equally lacked evidence to prove that he was harmful in whatever way. While in prison, the author experiences a different feeling of life and starts to imagine that he would die and nobody would ever know what happened to him or even why. He begins to believe that no one will ever help him get justice and that people will forever see him as someone that has caused harm onto anyone in Dakar. These imaginations takes him back to the main reason why he is in prison; walking in Dakar streets at night in his foreign skin without proof that he was harmless and may be just “a tourist.”

Edwards’ narration aimed at achieving several ends, depicting the prison life in Dakar and probably how Africans viewed the white. In his narrations, we see him visit the fort and perceive that depending on the audience, the curator gives talks to suit the moment. It is in the prison that he begins to realize the importance of freedom and even goes ahead to discover that other Americans are also jailed in the same prison, probably for the same reason.

My reading of this text is illuminating because it starts and leads into literary inquiry after which the solution to the intellectual problem is availed. After being held, almost throughout the half of the text, the solution to the intellectual problem does not only offer a reprieve that indeed the author did not commit any capital crime but also depicts the inefficiency on the part of the police. He also goes into great detail about how the prisoners are treated while they are in prison and the constant fear that courses through the bodies of the prisoners at all times. On page 51, Edwards describes to us how while he was imprisoned he constantly heard terrible screams and listening to those piercing sounds all night long. While having to hear these agonizing screams, all he was ever able t think about was when he will be next. The police hold Edwards in Prison and there is no effort to let anyone close to him know of his predicament. He beings to believe that he will die in that little cell, as the “ same words caress him to sleep: Die here” (Evidence, 54). On page 54, Edwards begins to believe that he is starting to show symptoms of Malaria, and still he doesn’t think that that is the worst thing that could be going on in his life at the moment. He continues to tell us that the authorities had no reason to arrest him, so why should they have any reason to let him go? It is through his personal efforts that see Thierno contacted.

The motive of this text does not just end at telling it is wrong to walk without identification in the streets of Dakar, but equally illuminates the tribulations that prisoners in Dakar, generally go through. While tourists are common in such African countries, the arrest of Edwards shows that the government of Senegal has a low hospitality appetite. The rampant corruption in the prison where an individual needs to buy the basic items as food reveals that deplorable state of affairs in the entire system. To make the matters even worse, the police guarding the cells are the trade masters instead of discouraging the same. The fact that Edwards was not taken to court or was not charged and no one confirmed his charges is proof enough that Dakar’s law favors the momentous master. Therefore, Edwards’ start with the prison description motivates a line of thought that later gets developed along the concepts of fairness, evidence, good governance and dignity for all as revealed through the prison life and the life on the streets of Dakar.

When the semester first began, I was always super confident in my writing. All throughout high school, I always received grades in the mid 90s and got amazing feedback from my teachers and peers. This semester though, I realized how much I was able to improve. There were so many things that I learned that I could use in my writing that will enhance it to its best potential. The most important thing that I learned was how to receive feedback and revise my essays and delve further into detail in specific parts of my writing.

From one assignment to the next, I definitely carried over the use of an intellectual problem. I found that narrowing down my paper to one specific problem is so much better than focusing on a problem as a whole. The use of stating a question in your essay makes it so much easier to make it as clear as possible to the reader what I will be trying to prove. Sometimes though, I found it kind of hard to narrow down everything I wanted to prove with one simple question. Reading back my last 3 essays, I really do realize how this narrow question helps develop the essay in a way I never thought possible. Also, on almost all my drafts you kept on asking me to re-state the question over and over again in the middle parts of my paper. I never realized how important this was until recently. While reading someone’s paper, you get a bit side tracked and almost forget the main point of the paper, but stating the intellectual problem over and over again makes sure your point does now get lost in the paper. I also learned how to properly and better use citations. I always used to just simply, copy and paste the quote and then in parenthesis, write out the author of the article I am copying from. In this class, I constantly made sure to start introducing the author of the article I am citing and discuss what he is saying before the quote and a bit after. When I was not doing this, I feel like the reader never got a clear sense of why I am quoting this author and why this specific quote will help further prove my point. I feel like both these new found ways of writing will help me throughout all my classes because both of these tactics are very general, but still allow you to make your writing so much better.

I learned to critically analyze texts that we have read in class and use them appropriately in my papers. For essay 1, when we had to close read “Evidence” and form an intellectual problem from that, I found it really hard to do so at first. I could not seem to get myself to really read in between the lines and find “the hidden message” the writer was trying to portray using tone of voice, specific uses of words and specific descriptions of settings around him.

Using a variety of media to compose multiple rhetorical situations helped me to build my essay and focus on a broader audience. I found that by using different forms of media and different perspectives from each source helped me target many audiences while still redirecting back to my main point. These different perspectives also helped me to look at my argument from different points of view. Instead of only focusing on what I think about my topic, I got to see what other writings, government officials or any other type of professional thinks about what I am trying to argue.

Throughout the semester, I absolutely loved the peer review and the constant back and forth with the drafts. I never realized how important feedback could be to the development of your paper. I was getting feedback on how to improve things I didn’t even think I needed to do. Also, the feedback was so helpful because when I am writing and then reading my own work, I think, “oh wow this is absolutely perfect! Definitely an A paper!” but when a fresh set of eyes looks it over, the problems with your writing end up coming up. I also really liked the meetings that you set up with us to talk one-on-one about our drafts. These little meetings gave me an opportunity to speak to you if something I was doing was not clear and how I would be able to improve it. Also, I found myself at the writing center a few times and really realized how important that is. Sometimes, when I would go, they would help me realize a better point to prove rather than what I am trying to prove. They were able to fix specific things about my paper that I did not even think needed fixing.

On my last paper, I realized how important it is to really narrow down an audience to a specific group. Since on my second paper, I wrote about college rape and how it is mishandled, for my third paper I decided to write about rape in a mans world. At first, I focused on all men in general, but the more I started researching, I realized that my audience was too broad. So I then decided to narrow it down to guys that are still young and in college. When I began to conduct my interviews, I realized that the guys that I was interviewing were all young straight men, so I decided that that will be my audience. Narrowing my audience down also made it so much easier for me to conduct research because I was primarily focusing on one type of guy rather than all men.

When I read the first email that I sent you, my main goal was to improve my writing; clearly I was not specific enough. Like I stated at the beginning of the semester, I am planning on studying marketing and advertising and a lot of that is speaking and being clear and to the point and how to target a specific audience. A lot of my work in the future will be giving speeches and conducting interviews, and taking this class definitely taught me how to correctly organize whatever it is that I desire to write about.