who pour money into the institution, and who might see the players on their team representing the university and so also themselves in some part.
On top of all of this, football is the most popular sport in the US. It makes a lot of money for a lot of people. College football is now second to the NFL in overall sports revenues. Universities are often financially invested in major sports, so officials—and highly paid coaches, making literally a hundred times what they earned forty years ago—have some motivation to absolve players and move on as if nothing happened. The issue is so deeply rooted that Senator Claire McCaskill’s report on sexual assaults on college campuses, released in July 2014, found that “approximately 20 percent of the nation's largest public institutions and 15 percent of the largest private institutions allow their athletic departments to oversee cases involving student athletes.”[3]
This is not completely surprising. The power of football can stretch all the way into the courtroom too. In 2004, six Brigham Young football players (former and current) were charged in connection to the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl. Two went to trial and one of the other players testified against them, saying on the stand, “We knew we had done something that was wrong. We took advantage of a girl that we shouldn’t have.” After the jury acquitted the players, the prosecutor says, one of the jury members told her the players had suffered enough because “they lost their scholarships” and “they were kicked off the team.”[4]
V.
All of this together is paradoxical: there are cultural power structures that surround football players and protect them from having to answer for the violence they commit; but the very importance of the sport and our fascination with it means that we pay more attention to these power structures than the ones that operate in everyday cases where the perpetrator is not a public figure. In untangling how players are protected and why, we can use this microcosm to see larger societal forces at play that protect all kinds of people, guilty or innocent, who are accused of sexual or interpersonal violence.
The problem of sexual violence is a cultural one, not limited to any single group. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that “an estimated 19.3 percent of women and 1.7 percent of men [in the United States] have been raped during their lifetimes,” with “an estimated 43.9 percent of women and 23.4 percent of men [who said they] experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes.”[5] According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (often referred to as RAINN), 17.6 percent of all women will be raped or victims of attempted rape in their lifetime.[6] Almost the exact same percentage, 17.7 percent, is true for all white women, while black women have a slightly higher chance at 18.8 percent while only making up 13.2 percent of the population, and Native American women are staggeringly high at 34.1 percent despite being only 1.2 percent of the population. In December 2014, Callie Marie Rennison, a criminology professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, published a piece in the New York Times where she wrote that she and her colleague, Lynn A. Addington at American University, “found that the estimated rate of sexual assault and rape of female college students, ages eighteen to twenty-four, was 6.1 per 1,000 students. This is nothing to be proud of, but it is significantly lower than the rate experienced by women that age who don’t attend college—8 per 1,000.”[7] In short, economically disadvantaged women, who are “in the lowest income bracket, with annual household incomes of less than $7,500, are sexually victimized at 3.7 times the rate of women with household incomes of $35,000 to $49,999, and at about six times the rate of women in the highest income bracket (households earning $75,000 or more annually).” On top of this, economics break along racial lines. According to a report by the Pew Research Center in December 2014, published at the same time as Rennison’s piece, “The wealth of white households was thirteen times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010” and “the wealth of white households is now more than ten times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.”[8] All of this, taken together, suggests that the people most likely to be victims of sexual assault in the US are economically disadvantaged women of color.
And yet, we are currently having a cultural moment regarding college campus sexual assault. In a country of roughly 319 million people, about 6.5 percent (twenty-one million) attend college, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.[9] And that 6.5 percent is made of a particular slice of the population. As Rebecca Klein wrote in the Huffington Post in October 2014, “Students who went to low-minority, higher-income suburban schools were the most likely to have enrolled in college. Among higher-income schools, those with high populations of minority students posted lower college enrollment rates than low-minority schools.”[10] This is interesting when you consider the statistics above about victims of sexual assault. Certainly our focus on college sexual assault stems in part from our cultural tendency to pay far more attention to the experiences of white, middle/upper-class Americans. We have idealized dreams about what college is supposed to represent in the lives of young adults, a time of exploration, surrounded by peers and learning, all in preparation for going out into the world and becoming somebody. There is no space in these wishful aspirations for the realities of sexual violence that we find everywhere else. Another aspect of the focus on college sexual assault is that tackling it seems doable; after all, we are only talking about a small percentage of the population in a confined space.
All of this combined is why we have seen an ever-increasing series of laws over the last few decades that are supposed to help mitigate, even eradicate sexual violence in this one particular part of our culture. Under Title IX (the federal statute best known for requiring gender parity in sports), which became law in 1972, a university receiving federal assistance must ensure that every person who attends the school has equal access to educational opportunities. A campus with known sexual predators within the student body is an obstacle to that access; universities that do not adequately protect students from sexual assault or ignore reported assaults are, therefore, in danger of losing federal funding. It’s worth noting that as of early 2016, no university has ever lost federal funding for Title IX violations.
The most difficult aspect of Title IX has always been enforcement. Since the crime of sexual assault is rarely reported, how do we measure if universities are doing enough? Victims of sexual assault are often afraid or ashamed to report the attack, or they fear they’ll be blamed for the circumstances of the assault. When they do speak up, they are often not believed. As one consequence, only a fraction of rapists land behind bars. Nevertheless, the 1990 Clery Act (a.k.a. the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act) created standardized reporting requirements, necessitating colleges to be more transparent about crimes taking place on their campuses; the law has been amended and broadened several times.
The latest amendment, enacted in 2013, is called the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, or Campus SaVE Act. In order to comply with Title IX, the Clery Act, and SaVE, universities must perform a list of actions that include collecting data on interpersonal violence, providing victims with information about their right to report, conducting prompt and fair investigations of reported assaults, and educating students on such subjects as how to intervene as bystanders and how to reduce their risk of being assaulted.
President Obama’s administration, led principally by Vice President Joe Biden, has worked on the issue from multiple angles, including convening the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault; creating the site NotAlone.gov that provides “information for students, schools, and anyone interested in finding resources on how to respond to and prevent sexual assault on college and university campuses and in our schools”; and starting “It’s On Us,” a media campaign featuring high-profile actors and athletes who ask people to take a pledge “to recognize that nonconsensual sex is sexual assault, to identify situations in which sexual assault may occur, to intervene in situations where consent has not or cannot be given, and to create an environment in which sexual assault is unacceptable and survivors are supported.”
There are also new activist groups who are simultaneously drawing attention
