The following is drawn from a This American Life episode. It can be heard here.
The thing you need to know is that rates of rape in college hasn’t gone down since the 1970s. That’s when a woman named Mary Koss decided to start tracking it.
Mary was doing another project and decided she wanted to start asking students about their experiences of assault. But everyone said they had not been assaulted. So she switched it up. Asked them questions about their experiences. So many people said, “Well yeah, that’s happened to me.”
Mary Koss: … [in research] you translate [questions about an experience] into behavioral terms like, “how many drinks do you have in a day?” I decided to do that same thing with asking questions about sexual victimization and perpetration.
Chana Joffe-Walt (narrating)
Have you had someone use force or threaten to harm you to have sexual intercourse when you didn't want to?
Have you had a man penetrate you against your will?
Mary Koss will readily admit now that these are very straight and 1970s gendered questions. She looked at how rape is defined legally and built her questions around it. She'd ask women, have you had this experience? What about this?
Mary Koss (to Chana): They would turn around and say, “Yes, that happened to me. But no, I've never been raped.”
Chana Joffe-Walt (to Mary Koss): So when women actually would describe what happened, their experiences would often line up with the legal definition of rape. But when you'd ask them, “Were you raped?”, they would say no.
Mary Koss: That’s correct
Naming changed everything. It made the difference in the long road to healing. And that wouldn’t have been possible without the language to accurately title how damaging something had been.
To name is to make tangible the intangible, visible the invisible, actionable the mystery.
Naming matters. Words matter.
But naming is a tricky game. Because naming did not make the rape stop.
I learned I was stalked while peeing in a bathroom stall.
A student bulletin hung on the back of the door. And that day, it was about stalking.
I called my sister before I even left the bathroom, my hands still damp from washing. “Did you know we were stalked? That what M. did to us was stalking?”
My sister, who was training to be a therapist and knew more about this stuff, said, “Yeah. Of course. Did you not know that?” I had not.
I felt so much relief and vindication. Various people in my life had, to some degree, indicated that I was overreacting. That the guy wasn’t bad at all. And here it was in print on the back of a bathroom stall telling me I had been right the whole time.
But naming had not stopped the stalking.
And this is where Mary Koss’s research comes back in. She realized that we’ve spent 50 years trying to increase awareness of what rape and assault means–but only to the victims of these things. Rates haven’t gotten better.
What if we were teaching the wrong person the name for rape?
Chana (narrating): Mary Koss now believes we will not see any change until perpetrators understand what they are doing as rape. But getting perpetrators to identify their behavior? That's so much harder.
Mary Koss: You can see in surveys, even in person one-on-one, men will say--”I don't know why I'm here. I've been accused of raping somebody. I have no idea why.”
You can open the Arizona statutes. You can point them to the Chapter 14 offenses, which are sexual assault. You can underline the one that talks about taking advantage of someone when they're incapacitated from alcohol and unable to consent or stop what's happening.
And their face just goes white, because they had no idea. But now, you're showing them a law book that says that they raped somebody.
They could take a polygraph test, and they could pass it because they honestly don't believe that what they did was wrong.
An aside: I don’t know if these college-attending men are terrified because they realize they have committed a crime (for which there are consequences [in theory]). OR if they are terrified because they realize the harm they have done. That reckoning feels important for whatever structures might be built next, whatever educational system might generate a different outcome. Not only a name but what it means.
The name matters. And so does who we ask to know that name. To integrate it in their bones. Teaching men–the ones most likely to commit assault–what it means, we just might see something different in the outcomes.
Asking women–the most likely victim of assault–to carry the labor of knowing a name and speaking it, is too much.
It matters who we ask to know the name. It matters who we insist gives the name.
And if we don’t require the responsible party to know the name, we won’t get anywhere.
FROM THE BOOKSHOP
“Know My Name” is one of the most important books you will read this decade.
“When society questions a victim’s reluctance to report, I will be here to remind you that you ask us to sacrifice our sanity to fight outdated structures that were designed to keep us down.”
“He had not been aware of my one rule: I decide what I am capable of.”
“The barricades that held us down will not work anymore. And when silence and shame are gone, there will be nothing to stop us. We will not stand by as our mouths are covered, bodies entered. We will speak, we will speak, we will speak.”