MeToo

What We Don't Say About College Rape

The things we don't say are easier to survive than the truth.

We talk about alcohol. We talk about parties, bad decisions, consent education, dangerous strangers, campus safety. We talk about prevention as though the central problem were that young women haven’t yet learned how to protect themselves.

On the flip side, those of us willing to be critical talk about fraternity hazing, systemic violence, coverups happening at the highest level, and the misplaced blame upon victims rather than perpetrators.

We talk about teaching boys to be better — but it’s not that boys are being mistaught.

Boys — and girls, because it does happen — who rape do so because they have personality disorders: rape is catastrophic, and to be able to do it and then deny you’ve done harm takes deluded thinking and a lack of empathy.

It’s not that boys aren’t taught not to rape: they are.

If they didn’t know better, they wouldn’t know how to hide it and deny it.

It’s that anyone who rapes was a golden child to at least one narcissistic or sociopathic parent.

And golden children inherit a totally different world — and pathology — than everyone else in reality.

Their world, from birth, is one of hierarchy. People are sorted and ranked, and your high ranking, though deeply beneficial in privileges, is fragile. One misstep against authority who ranks higher can lead to extreme abuse, shame, and abandonment by the group.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

At birth, golden children are told they’re the best in the world: they’re coddled and spoiled. But they’re also triangulated with their other siblings — some are other goldens, some scapegoats, and some invisible children — and they’re made to see all of life as a competition for self worth.

Consequently, the yo-yo between spoiling and shame — the all good child vs. the all bad child — causes children to develop narcissism as a trauma response in childhood to protect their fragile psyche from shame, a feeling that a child’s brain cannot process without becoming suicidal.

This is also why scapegoat children develop BPD — we suffer from chronic suicidal ideation and self harming in childhood due to an abundance of shame at an age we can’t process.

The only path to healing for us is to do so when we are older and our frontal lobes have developed, causing the ability to process shame without it becoming life-threatening. Once we recognize that much of the shame we carried wasn’t ours, but our parents projecting their own shame into us, and once we grieve the weight of what we had to carry in childhood for our sick parents who never loved us, then we have a path to liberation.

Narcissists don’t have that path.

They never had the frontal lobe brain development to process shame, so they live life in a fantasy state of grandiosity and perfection.

They can inhabit fantasy with ease becauses they’re emotionally immature; essentially, they’re children in adult bodies.

And to rid themselves of shame, they must project it.

Meaning — everything that was done to them is something they’ll do to others.

This includes rape.

Research has been very clear on this: while not all rapists purport being raped in childhood, prison studies reveal that the vast majority of them identify being raped in childhood as the beginning of their compulsions to rape.

Thus, childhood victimization often creates perpetrators.

Though not all victims in childhood become perpetrators: only those with narcissism do, those who never develop empathy.

The other victims absorb the shame and suffer suicidal despair.

And it can’t be assumed that just because a perpetrator says they weren’t raped in childhood that they weren’t.

I know that some of them were, because I’ve known men who raped who told me they were never raped. One of my best friends in childhood told me this despite being open about sexual abuse perpetration in prison.

But then he later told me that he had sex with his teenage babysitter consensually at 8 years old.

An 8 year old can’t conset: that was a man in denial.

Because he couldn’t process the shame.

Some perpetrators won’t admit the shame because it was their family members or parents who assaulted them. And some genuinely blackout trauma or were too young to remember.

Regardless, nothing is changed until we face honest, even uncomfortable, truths. We don’t stop rape by teaching boys better or holding rich institutions and their leadership accountable.

We stop rape by addressing our cultural attitudes around parenting and golden child abuse, a much harder task that would require we stop pretending narcissism and sociopathy are rare and acknowledge we live in a mental health crisis.

Furthermore, we need to start looking at rape for what it really is…

It’s not just a random, dehumanizing attack. It has a function, and those who do it choose instinctively — with their ego.

Their ego is their trauma defense mechanism protecting them from shame.

The truth we so often fail to look at is that it’s not that the female victims of college rape have failed in some way — failed to dress correctly, protect themselves, choose their friends or romantic partners correctly.

They choose the women who are doing everything right.

Those are the women who threaten them by evoking shame.

The story that haunts me in thinking about cases such as the Cornell Seven is the possibility we rarely want to confront: that women are targeted because they’re extraordinary.

They are intelligent. They are ambitious. They are kind. They are hardworking. They are the students who have spent their lives earning what other people were handed — the grades, the scholarships, the admission letters, the praise, the futures.

And for a male narcissist who desires unearned privilege and golden child status — that very excellence in a woman makes them threatening.

This is where rape becomes difficult: it’s not a random attack. It’s not about male pleasure either. (A fair amount of them don’t orgasm or maintain an erection, and some studies noted that roughly 25% are reported to cry during or after committing rape).

Rape is actually about competition and dominance.

Elite institutions teach competition from childhood. As a private tutor, I’ve spent a lot of time with the demographics of ultra wealthy students who have an “Ivy League or bust” mindset…and they’re not mentally healthy or kind students, by and large.

There are only so many seats, fellowships, awards, internships, jobs, honors. Someone wins and someone loses.

I’ve had students whisper during zoom calls and instruct me to act like I was a friend and not a tutor, because they didn’t want their roommate at an Elite boarding school to know that they had a tutor. They were supposed to be a “natural genius,” but they were actually an average student struggling with ADHD.

In environments saturated with status, hierarchy, and entitlement, another person’s excellence or privileges become something to defeat rather than celebrate.

And if someone hasn’t authentically developed what another person possesses — intelligence, discipline, beauty, compassion, talent, confidence, uniqueness, kindness— there’s a darker alternative: they will try to steal it, diminish it, or destroy the person who possesses it.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen enough to feel confident that there’s something to it: it was almost always my BEST female students who got raped.

They weren’t just academically the best; they were genuinely loving, moral people — beautiful inside and out.

And I watched it destroy their dreams.

I watched a student with big dreams and a bigger heart with a near perfect grade have to drop all her classes during finals week. When I had to go to court for her a year later to testify about what she’d confided in her rape, I learned that she was struggling with addiction numbing and sexual promiscuity.

And I’ve also seen the ways that colleges show their teeth once a student comes forward with their trauma or confides in a professor who reports it to Title 9 as they’re mandated to.

I was laid off from two jobs, along with other female professors who’d been confided in, directly after doing so. And lawyers informed us of loophole clauses in our contracts that said we could be laid off for no reason at all. Thus, even though it happened as illegal retailiation to cover up a rape case, we had no legal claims for compensation or seeking justice.

These were harsh lessons, and they weren’t confined to a single institution or only elite institutions. It was all of them.

Once I see undeniable patterns, questions arise worth asking: what happens when a culture teaches people to experience other human beings as competitors, obstacles, possessions, or trophies?

Rape becomes an act of domination.

Just look how frequently rape has been used as a tool of war, imprisonment, or colonization.

And for the young woman experiencing it at a place of education and opportunity to attain their dreams and grow as a person, there’s a terrible clarity that statistics can’t capture.

There’s the moment when the world changes.

You understand that the person hurting you doesn’t care about your humanity.

You understand that the institution you trusted and took pride in isn’t a safe one, nor do they take pride in you and your worth.

You understand that people in leadership can never see you as a person too, because the inequalities of a hierarchy make you too far away for them to care about.

You understand that your body has become a territory over which someone else can assert ownership and defile.

You understand, with an animal terror deeper than language, that many people — often even people you cared for and trusted — are willing to cause you extraordinary harm.

And then comes the silence after rape.

I’ve experienced it enough times to know.

It’s the deepest, coldest silence in the universe.

It’s entrapment inside a black hole where no light can escape.

Because afterward, most survivors aren’t calmly weighing whether to report.

I’m a prison abolitionist, and I’m also educated enough to understand rape statistics: that 99.5% of cases never see a day in prison and that a victim’s life is most in danger directly after reporting — not just from perpetrators, but from random strangers throughout the community as well.

I wanted safety and therapy, first and foremost. Genuinely, I mostly wanted someone to hug me.

I get frustrated when people hear my stories and immediately say, “Did he go to prison?” Because the implication is that if a perpetrator doesn’t go to prison, then a crime didn’t happen.

And though I DID go to police during my worst case of assault, other times I didn’t, and most women don’t.

But there’s good reason that we don’t discuss enough.

It’s because rape is psychologically catastropic.

Survival takes extraordinary strength.

Rape victims are shattered. They’re frightened. They’re ashamed of something that was never their shame. They’re trying to understand how the world they inhabited yesterday can possibly be the same world today.

We fear retaliation.

We fear disbelief.

We may fear becoming the girl who was raped. Damaged goods.

And let’s not forget that we live in capitalism: our jobs don’t stop for rape. Classes don’t grant extensions for rape.

So many of us enter the first stage of grief in desperation: denial.

And it takes years and years to heal — many never make it.

Furthermore, rape victims may understand that reporting the person who hurt them could mean entering another institution — one with lawyers, administrators, reputations, donors, alumni, social hierarchies, and careers invested in keeping certain stories from becoming too loud.

And that’s where institutional betrayal becomes more than just complicit in the violence — they are a vital part of the violence.

They are the top of the hierarchy, where the violence is the most foul.

Fraternities have long been criticized for cultures in which sexual conquest, hazing, humiliation, and male bonding become intertwined. Survivors and researchers have documented environments in which sexual violence is normalized or minimized for decades. The most disturbing allegations involve multiple perpetrators and the transformation of another person’s suffering into a ritual of belonging.

When that happens, rape isn’t just an individual crime in which we can hold boys accountable or teach boys to be better or reform our most revered hierarchical institutions.

When that happens, rape is simply CULTURE.

And culture is protected by silence.

Some people actively participate. Others know and look away. Others convince themselves that preserving an institution’s reputation is more important than confronting what happened inside it.

Some may not consider themselves cruel at all. They simply protect the status quo because their salary, position, prestige, friendships, or future depends upon it.

I’ve seen people I truly loved and respected become mute during the most foul, blatant injustices. I’ve seen them suddenly act as if they were no longer in the room.

I remember a dean sitting in on a meeting in which I was being unjustly laid off who’d acted like my best friend during my whole employment simply stare at the floor with her head down in shame as leadership knifed me in the chest.

As I stood up to walk out with my security escort, I looked at her in shock for her silence, and I watched her silently mouth, “I’m sorry” at me.

But she’s still a dean there.

That’s one of capitalism’s ugliest bargains: obedience can be purchased with the threat of poverty and loss of hierarchical power.

Many people aren’t strong enough to not abandon their principles when it comes to their desire to economically survive.

So others become the scapegoats. Others must suffer the losses, be thrust to the bottom of the hierarchical system — a neutralized threat.

A person doesn’t have to be evil to participate in an evil system.

Sometimes all that’s required is the knowledge that telling the truth or having morals could cost everything.

And so the raped woman in a college and the adults who try to protect that raped woman disappear beneath the machinery of abuse.

Her education continues, perhaps. The institution continues. The fraternity continues. Administrators keep their offices. Alumni keep donating. Everyone moves forward.

Except the part of her that’s going gangrene — the pocket of her shattered psyche.

She has to carry the knowledge that something enormous happened to her — and that an entire social structure may have been more interested in protecting itself than protecting her.

That’s what we don’t say enough about college rape.

The tragedy is more than a woman being violated.

It’s that one of the institution’s best and brightest woman was violated.

And it’s in the horror of the discovery — during the moment when she was most vulnerable, when she needed love most — how many people were willing to let her be.

The very people who she’d expected to protect her and help her grow had dug an open mass grave to toss Jane Does in before they ever heard her name.

If you’d like to support my writing, check out my books or Buy Me a Coffee.

One blog a week=free email subscription/ Two blogs a week=$5 a month

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

For a copy of any of my books, check out this link:

Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.