[Trigger warning: This article mentions sexual assault.]
Sex Signals," or as upperclassmen might remember it from their orientations, "In the SACK," is the one bit of mandatory sexual-assault awareness presentation that all students at Tufts receive. While people might hear more about it from time to time, depending on your social circles, you can go through your entire Tufts career without really hearing another mention of it.
I did, for my first two years here, anyway. Sure, I would talk about things with friends who were more cognizant than I, or read things in the Daily, but I don't think I really understood how it is a problem here at Tufts.
Then junior year came around. The Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) did a workshop during RA training, and around the same time, some friends of mine got incredibly involved in Action for Sexual Assault Prevent and the Consent Culture Network. And during one of those, a statistic that is thrown around a lot - 25 percent of women in college will be a survivor of sexual assault - finally got through to me.
Tufts is not immune to that figure. That's well over 100 students per graduating class, and that even ignores the male victims. It's one person at a full round table in Dewick, and it's someone from your English I class. It's more than a couple people on the rugby team, and it's a couple more from your freshman floor.
That last one was especially poignant for me. I was an RA on a floor of 44 freshmen last year, and I got to know them pretty well. Statistics may say otherwise, but I choose to believe that no one on the floor was so unfortunate. But the sad reality is that even if it wasn't true for someone on my floor, it was for someone else in the building.
And the worst part? It is likely that they don't even consider the experience to have been assault. BARCC gives as the legal definition of sexual assault "non-consensual sexual penetration of any body part by any other body part and/or object." A full half of sexual assault survivors' experiences meets that definition, yet they themselves do not realize the situation to have been assault.
The administration has set up a task force to "study" the issue, but even so, it does not always appear that it takes it seriously. If a quarter of the undergraduates reported being mugged before graduation, the Medford/Somerville campus would be on virtual lockdown by now. And much of it is for a simple reason: The student body does not seriously demand change.
Now, I have never heard anyone on this campus say that someone who was raped "deserved" it or anything as terrible as that. But that doesn't mean the environment on campus is particularly good. Examples are abundant: Delta Upsilon is colloquially known as the "rape frat" - this is bad whether said in a joking or in a semi-serious manner. Tufts Confessions made it abundantly clear that a large chunk of students don't know the first thing about the long-lasting mental anguish that assault can cause. Consider that hardly anyone will call out another student for saying, "That test raped me."
Well, start by trying to change that. The next time you hear something related to sexual assault that you don't like, call that person out on it. It might not do a dent in immediately affecting any of those dreadful figures, but at least it's a start to changing campus culture.
Bhushan Deshpande is a senior majoring in quantitative economics. He can be reached at Bhushan.Deshpande@tufts.edu.
