A headline last week caught my curiosity: “1 in 4 College Students Surveyed Cite Unwanted Sexual Contact.”
I thought: That’s all? Can you graduate from college if nobody has pawed you without your consent?
When I went to MSU 30 years ago, guys playfully wrestled with girls to catch a glimpse of bare skin and some brief friction with it. Sometimes girls initiated.
Keggers were thrilling but dangerous: Guys said what they were thinking out loud. The crowd allowed strangers to press against you.
At football games, you prayed guys wouldn’t pull you up, toss you in the air and pass you hand-to-hand up the stands as your sweater crept up to your neck.
Nobody much complained about this. We put up with it, batting hands away. We rolled our eyes. We laughed so as not to seem stiff or cold.
What else could you do? The air was slick with sexual innuendo and intent.
Nor did we call it harassment. It was a rite of passage, the trials you had to survive to grow wiser. A woman in particular had to be annoyed and embarrassed before she could be tough and strong enough to fight back.
Is it worse now? Probably. But resignation, not outrage, is still the response.
The survey released this week, by the American Association of University Women, polled 2,036 students, men and women.
It defined sexual harassment broadly: “unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior which interferes with your life.”
Almost two-thirds of the students said, “Yep, that happened to me.”
Fewer, about a quarter, reported specific, hands-on incidents. Seven percent had clothing pulled down or up or off. Five percent were asked for sex in return for a better grade, class notes or another bennie.
But wait: These 2,036 students were not just victims. Half the men and a third of the women admitted they’d harassed others – mostly, they said, because “I thought it was funny.”
Elena Silva, who directed the study, said in a press conference that sexual harassment has become such a normal part of college that those who tease and taunt and touch “see themselves as misunderstood comedians who are doing what is acceptable, even expected.”
Even some of the victims agreed. Few had complained.
“It wasn’t that big a deal,” one junior told the survey team. “I didn’t want anybody to get in trouble, or make myself look childish.”
The AAUW, and more than half the students surveyed, wish colleges would set up web-based systems to allow confidential complaints about harassment.
That’s only a Band-Aid. To change the way young men and women interact about sex requires change in every American household that raises children.
More conversation, early and often, might help.
So might boycotting movies, TV shows, video games, magazines and advertisers that teach women to tease and men to snatch whatever they can.
It’s a huge job, hey? Easier to reminisce, cross our fingers and hope for the best for this generation and the next.
c 2006, Detroit Free Press.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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