College Rape Tribunals: Partial Justice

Serious question.  If a parent finds out his or her drunk college child was raped on campus, will the parent immediately chastise his or her child for drinking in the first place or will he or she instinctively condemn the rapist?  Some logical parents will consider the former, but most concerned parents will resort to condemning their baby’s enemy.  Psychologist Daniel Goleman referred to this phenomena as an amygdala hijack.  

During an amygdala hijack, the part of the brain responsible for producing feelings of fear and anger, the amygdala, overshadows a threatened person’s ability to think or respond rationally.  Get this: the amygdala also controls a person’s empathy.  So, don’t be surprised if you witness angry parents willing to Mike Tyson their child’s rapist’s ear off.

Here’s the infamous Mike Tyson amygdala hijack:

Poor Evander Holyfield.  Now compare Tyson’s bellicose punches to the amygdala hijack of a perturbed father:

Synonymous to parents who are sure to abandon rationale for the glory of their own children, university officials on a college rape tribunal are sure to defend the reputation of their institution over sympathetically defending the true victims of a rape accusation.

Such empathy is depicted in the case of Xiaolu “Peter” Yu of Vassar College.  Yu was expelled by the college rape tribunal at Vassar College despite social media evidence that the supposed rape “victim,” Mary Claire Walker, admitted to initiating the sex.  According to her Facebook messages to Yu, Walker had a “wonderful time” taking Yu’s virginity which she claimed to be something she “[knew] how to do.”  What a sweet, innocent victim right? Well it’s no doubt the belief of the college tribunal who were the comrades of Walker’s father, a professor at Vassar College.  Smells fishy? That’s because it is illegal according to the U.S. Constitution.

According to the 6th Amendment on the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an IMPARTIAL jury of the State and district.”  If college rape tribunals are sentencing the accused rapists to expulsion—a ticket into a failed future and possibly an impediment to future college applications—then the accused should be entitled to an impartial jury.  When I say impartial jury, I mean a jury that has no prior connections to neither the defendant nor the accused.

An impartial jury is imperative to a fair trial.  I see this every week at the local police station where I serve as the lead defense attorney for the North Carolina Teen Court Association (NCTCA). Teen Court is a volunteer program designed to give first time offenders (ages 16 and under) a second chance with the law.  It is a real court for real juvenile crimes (e.g. bringing a weapon on school campus, fighting, drug/alcohol possession, theft, and vandalism).  In Teen Court, jury members are only allowed to impose verdicts on defendants they do not know.  If a jury member recognizes or knows even the slightest rumors about a case, he or she is immediately removed from that case’s jury.  This screening process ensures the jury is an impartial, legal one.

Partial college rape tribunals are not limited to small liberal arts colleges in New York.  Check out this lengthy list of American higher education institutions with open Title IX sexual violence investigations posted by the U.S. Department of Education: 

 

State	Institution
AZ	Arizona State University
CA	Butte-Glen Community College District
CA	Occidental College
CA	University of California-Berkeley
CA	University of Southern California
CO	Regis University
CO	University of Colorado at Boulder
CO	University of Colorado at Denver
CO	University of Denver
CT	University of Connecticut
DC	Catholic University of America
FL	Florida State University
GA	Emory University
HI	University of Hawaii at Manoa
ID	University of Idaho
IL	Knox College
IL	University of Chicago
IN	Indiana University-Bloomington
IN	Vincennes University
MA	Amherst College
MA	Boston University
MA	Emerson College
MA	Harvard College
MA	Harvard University—Law School
MA	University of Massachusetts-Amherst
MD	Frostburg State University
MI	Michigan State University
MI	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
NC	Guilford College
NC	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
ND	Minot State University
NH	Dartmouth College
NJ	Princeton University
NY	Cuny Hunter College
NY	Hobart and William Smith Colleges
NY	Sarah Lawrence College
NY	Suny at Binghamton
OH	Denison University
OH	Ohio State University
OH	Wittenberg University
OK	Oklahoma State University
PA	Carnegie Mellon University
PA	Franklin and Marshall College
PA	Pennsylvania State University
PA	Swarthmore College
PA	Temple University
TN	Vanderbilt University
TX	Southern Methodist University
TX	The University of Texas-Pan American
VA	College of William and Mary
VA	University of Virginia
WA	Washington State University
WI	University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
WV	Bethany College
WV	West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine

Did any of the listed institutions surprise you?  I was almost in disbelief that the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was on the list.  Perhaps, my reaction was an amygdala hijack that caused me to irrationally rule out the possibility of a university so near home—I even spent a weekend there over the summer—to be a harmful environment.  

Whether you are a college student, a high school student, a parent, a teacher, etc., recognizing the presence of sexual harassment merely touches the surface of the issue.  If we want to prevent rapes on college campuses, then it’s time to serve justice impartially—and I’m not referring to a college tribunal.

 

 

It’s Okay to be The Stranger: A Reader’s Response

          It’s better to feel than not to feel.  I’ve always been taught to think this way.  To be sensitive, to be mindful, to be warmhearted.  But who says emotions make me better than someone else?  Where do feelings come from anyway?  Albert Camus’ The Stranger introduced me to Meursault’s controversial objective approach to life, and how society deems a tearless man at his mother’s wake worthy of death.  Meursault’s insensitivity to the world makes me question the sources of my emotions and how my actions are perceived by my peers.

          Ambition is life.  Everything I do is marked with ambition–school work, extracurriculars, relationships–there is intent.  What happens when ambition is gone?  Like me, Meursault “was a student” who had “a lot of ambitions.  But when [he] had to give up [his] studies [he] learned very quickly that none of it really mattered” (41).  So Meursault had ambitions too.  This man who seems so indifferent to his surroundings once cared about his future.  What happened?  Perhaps I am only ambitious because I am a 17-year-old who has a whole life ahead of me, but Meursault has been there, done that–outgrown this hopeful stage.  Maybe I am the foolish dreamer, and Meursault is the wise man.  I can’t help but wonder what sort of tribulations caused Meursault to think ambitions are not worth pursuing.

          Perhaps the absence of a father figure left Meursault financially disadvantaged, and his mother couldn’t give him the education he once envisaged.  I see this same struggle in my mother.  The youngest out of seven children, Mama slaved her way through school.  She walked miles every day to study ten hours without a bite to stifle her grumbling stomach.  Mama blamed my grandpa–a drunk who couldn’t feed his starving children.  She cares for my grandma, but often she has revealed her true feelings: “pareho sila, walang kwentang magulang” (“they’re the same, useless parents”).  Despite graduating valedictorian and being offered a generous scholarship for college, Mama was forced to decline because her parents couldn’t pay for her transportation.  In an instant, she saw years of her hard work and dream of becoming a physician descending down the dreadful drain called reality.  Is this the same reason Meursault thinks “at one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead” (65)?  Maman to Meursault, could have been my grandpa to Mama–an inadequate parent undeserving of further idle existence.  Or perhaps, Meursault is traumatized by his crushed dreams and finds it too pretentious to continue living a fanciful life.   I, on the other hand, don’t really have a reason to stop aspiring.  Why stop? I’m already in America.  That is a dream come true.   I have grown up within a dream.  Losing sight of my ambition would mean losing sight of who I am; ambition is a part of me.  It has even become a label coined by my peers: “Charmic? Oh, she’s that Asian girl who has serious goals.”  But how would my peers’ perception of me change if I wasn’t an immigrant?  Then, would I just be another Southern girl trying too hard to escape into a college up North?  I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know that ambition is not the only thing that fuels me.

          Unfulfilled desires eventually become forgotten causes without faith. And Meursault simply doesn’t have faith.  Religion has played an integral part in my mother’s life, and in turn, my life.  I pray when I miss my family in the Philippines, I pray when that AP Chemistry test didn’t give me the best vibes, I pray when school gets to be so stressful that I cry, I pray when I miss that special someone so much I can feel my heart squeezing against my rib cage.  I pray and I pray and I pray. Until my worries go away. Or at least until I have diverted my pain to a divine entity–someone who can take care of them.  But not everyone has this same religious habit because not everyone has the same religious foundation.  Meursault is a candid man, and when he insists “Maman had never in her life given thought to religion” (6), I believe him.  Or at least, I believe he is stating the full extent of  his knowledge.   Maman must’ve never introduced religion to Meursault.  How could Meursault regard religion as the answer to his legal problems when he lived his whole life without it?  It’s hard to give credit to something unfamiliar.  I have prayed all my life. I have found comfort in religion all my life.  Meursault hasn’t.  Besides, believing in God after living a life without religion just because he fears a miserable afterlife is more immoral than death without religion because the conversion is an insincere last-minute push for spiritual security.

          Meursault and I are undeniably different, but this is perfectly fine.  People are not intended to be the same.  If they were, then what’s the point of a judicial system such as the one Meursault faced?  Wouldn’t a trial be useless because each person is the same and therefore worthy of identical verdicts?  Each individual has his or her own experiences, values, and milieus to draw from.  Deeming a man worthy of death because he lacks conventional emotion is ignorance.  Judging people without considering external factors that shaped their characters is also ignorance.  Meursault is not the stranger here.  His critics are the strangers–strangers to the diversity humanity has to offer.

Work Cited

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Random House, 1988. Print.

“Patterns of Rhythm”

In his poem “What I Said,” Norman Stock uses run-on lines and no punctuation to mimic the speaker’s frenzied, meandering mindset.  Stock wastes no time in introducing the reader to the speaker’s reaction “after the terror.”  The speaker “went home and cried and / said how could this happen and / how could such a thing be and why why.”  Stock’s purposeful avoidance of recognizing what the “terror” is focuses the reader on the speaker’s unfolding afterthoughts as opposed to the event that triggered the afterthoughts.  Repetition of the conjunction “and” in lines 2 – 4 embodies not only masculine endings, but also the speaker’s conjunctive—almost breathless—ideas.

Stock further emphasizes the importance of repetition through the spondee foot “why why” in the beginning of line 5.  Emphasis on the two syllables in the phrase “why why” forces the reader to imitate the speaker’s frantic search for answers to the previously mentioned “terror.” The speaker’s increasing anxiety is echoed by the lengthening of each line except line 11 which isolates the speaker’s question on how “[they will] live.”  Concentration on “we live,” suggests the speaker’s ultimate concern is his and his people’s survival.  In fact, he’s so focused on their survival that he willingly suggests, “Let’s kill them [the terrorists]!”.

“Sounds”

In her poem “Occupation,” Eliza Griswold uses rhythmic masculine rhymes to echo the successive circumstances in which Muslim prostitutes in Kabul, Afghanistan are left to resort in prostitution.  Griswold begins with “the prostitutes in Kabul tap[ping] their feet beneath their faded burkas in the heat.” The onomatopoeia “tap” compels the reader to use both visual and auditory imagery in perceiving the prostitutes’ behavior.  Typically, foot tapping is associated with anxiety, and the prostitutes’ hidden anxiety seems to be exemplified in the same conventional manner.  While Griswold’s reference to the burkas sustains the poem’s cultural context, it also provides a situational irony as these “traditional garments,” meant to esteem the Islamic religion, are covering the not-so-traditional prostitutes.

Upon completion of the first two introductory lines, Griswold wastes no time in disclosing the prostitutes’ personal circumstances.  Through assonance that stresses the vowel sound “e,” Griswold reveals the frank motivations of the prostitutes.  “For bread or fifteen cents, they’ll [the prostitutes] take a man to bed,” and if “their husbands [are] dead,” while their “seven kids [are] unfed,” these women alleviate the situation through prostitution.  It is important to take note of Griswold’s use of syntactical hyphens to force the reader to pause and let the sounds seep in with its intended logic.  Griswold further conveys the prostitutes’ straightforward mindset as they give “thanks [to the] occupation,” which allowed their “rents [to] have risen twentyfold” and their “chickens, pots, and carpets,” to have been sold.

Although Griswold appears to be adhering to the circumstantial logic behind the prostitutes’ motivations, she recoils from the usual closing masculine rhymes at the end of line 7 to unveil her true opinion.  By claiming the “women’s flesh [are] now worth its weight in tin,” perhaps Griswold is suggesting how the prostitutes are ultimately degraded into meat (flesh) stored in (tin) cans.  Griswold’s final message on the “Talibs” preference and the previous worth of women leaves the reader thinking she blames the cultural context.

“Symbol, Allegory, and Irony”

In his poem “Seventeen,” Andrew Hudgins uses symbolism and situational irony to convey a life lesson on how sometimes people must be mature and consider the harsh, practical option as opposed to the hopeful, yet unrealistic one.  The poem begins with the speaker witnessing the misery of the dog as his abusive owner takes “a hard left turn” and the dog “tipped off the side” of his “blue Ford.”  Hudgins uses evocative verbs—“scrambled,” “scraped,” “tumbled,” “snapped,” “hurtled”—to vividly emphasize the dog’s torment.  Hudgins instills a sense of frustration and sympathy in the reader through images of the dog “shiver[ing],” “flinch[ing],” and “moan[ing]” as “both hind legs were twisted.”  The convincing pathos becomes increasingly hard to avoid as the reader encounters the seemingly compassionless owner who had the nerve to “grin” about his dog’s agony.

The persona noticeably conveys sympathy for the dog as he resorts to cursing a “grown-up man”—something he has “never” done before.  Hudgins shocks the reader when he imposes situational irony through the speaker’s actions.  The persona, who previously suggested compassion, “knelt down by the dog” and “slammed the rock down twice” to end the dog’s life.  Hudgins’ use of syntactical dashes to set apart “tail flick” is interesting because it stresses the impact this sign of life made on the persona and ultimately suggests the persona’s reluctance in killing the dog.  It is also fascinating how the speaker felt the need to mention he “was seventeen.”  Perhaps, killing the innocent dog symbolizes a rite of passage into the practical cognitive world of an adult as the speaker realistically considers the dog’s devastating injuries (both hind legs were twisted) and decides what may be the better fate for the dog.

“Figures of Speech”

In her poem “Mirror,” Sylvia Plath uses personification of a mirror talking about its owner’s reflection to convey a message on how honest self-image plays an integral role in a person’s internal happiness.  From the beginning of the poem, Plath personifies the mirror as something that is able to “swallow immediately” what it sees and does so with “no preconceptions.”  This clever introduction to the mirror’s human-like ability to candidly perceive what it supposedly sees (the girl and of course the “pink with speckles” wallpaper) and “meditate” suggests that the mirror is a metaphoric representation of the girl’s conscious mind.  With another metaphor, the mirror claims to be “a lake” from which the girl searchers for “what she really is.”  Notice how the girl is trying to understand “what” she is and not “who” she is.  This is interesting as it suggests a feeble understanding of herself as typically a person needs to know “what” he or she is before knowing the “who” aspect.  Otherwise, it would be like describing something without knowing what that something is—a collapse in the logical process.

It is no wonder the girl returns to the mirror as a woman with “tears and agitation of hands.”  Perhaps she is pouring out her true feelings which are influenced by “those liars” or the image imposed on her by other people.  Her time with the mirror symbolizes contemplation about her self-image.  She is unhappy and seeks comfort in the attempt to understand who or “what” she truly wants to be.  The idea that she “comes and goes” is paradoxical in that the woman comes so close in recognizing herself through self-reflection (symbolized by the mirror), only to be subjected again to external factors when she leaves the solace of her home.  The final simile on how  the truth about her image “rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” leaves the reader urging the woman to kill the fish and find inner happiness with who she is.

“Images”

          In her poem “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t),” Patricia Smith uses vivid imagery to express the identity crisis a “black” girl endures in a white-favored world and to ultimately garner empathy from her audience.  From the very beginning of her poem, Smith urges the reader to imagine “being 9 years old” and “feeling like you’re not finished, like your edges are wild.” Notice how Smith uses the second person pronoun “you” and the universal idea of being awkward during adolescence (“edges are wild”) to infuse a connection between the reader and the persona she is portraying in the poem.  This initial invitation into stepping into the persona’s shoes prepares the reader to embrace the following context. 

           The image of a young girl “dropping food coloring into [her] eyes to make them blue” has a negative connotation as dyeing one’s eyes with food coloring is probably dangerous and the act itself suggests insecurity in one’s appearance.  In fact, Smith even admits that the girl was “suffering” her “burn[ing eyes] in silence.”  Smith continues to illustrate the supposedly favorable look of a white girl with images of a “bleached white mophead” over the “kinks of your hair.”  Observe how Smith does not illustrate the standard “blonde” hair; she resorts to the highest—or lightest—degree of blonde hair: “bleached white” to symbolize the painstaking effort the black girl endures to please society. 

          As the girl ages, her perception of “white” being paramount continues to develop as she “[grew] tall and [wore] a lot of white.”  What is interesting is despite her evident strive to fit in, she is compensated with violence.  “Bullets,” “flame and fists,” and the odor of “blood in your breakfast” are stomach-turning imagery that compels the reader to feel for the black girl.  When taken into historical context, the images of violence and the publication date (1955) suggest that the poem was inspired by the events leading up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.  The final idea of the black girl—or woman—“caving in around [a man’s] fingers” reflects her previously mentioned need for security and leaves a final note of vulnerability, which is true for the black race during the contextual time period.   

“Word Choice, Word Order, and Tone”

          In her poem “Sex without Love,” Sharon Olds uses middle diction filled with provocative imagery and ideas to convey a message of disapproval towards lust and birthing a child out-of-wedlock.  Although Olds initially uses the term “make love” which typically has a positive connotation related to sensual romance, she eventually reveals the foul play by stating the mothers will give birth “only to give them [the babies] away.”  Typically, mothers are associated with a gentle nature, and the idea of mothers giving their babies away evokes frowned-upon irresponsibility.  Apparently during sex, the so-called “beautiful dancers’’ (or the partners) “fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies” with “faces red as steak” and “wine wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away.” This description of sex is interesting because Olds refrains from using the usual jargon and resorts to comparing the act into a meal.  Perhaps Olds wanted to imply how sex itself is analogous to consuming a meal as the partners become physically intertwined as one, or maybe she wanted to portray a deeper issue on morals.  In “faces red as steak,” steak’s denotation suggests a slice of meat, but Olds seems to be implying a negative connotation in the act of sex itself.  Often when a person has meaningless sex with another person, it is regarded as “treating someone as a piece of meat,” and the color “red” suggests a feeling of shame in the act.

          Olds’ second rhetorical question in the poem imposes a different opinion from the beginning of the poem.  She mentions how the people having sex without love are “the true religious, the purist, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah” and the ones who “love the priest instead of God.”  If read from a literal view, Olds seems to be suggesting that having sex without love isn’t too defective after all.  However, the idea of someone having sex for their “own pleasure” insinuates a selfish act.  Even Olds’ syntax in the repetition of the phrase “come to the” with extra spaces surrounding the word “God” suggests how these lustful partners are so far away from the wisdom of God and in the need of repentance.