Margaret Foster Raising Awareness about at UNC-Chapel Hill in an Age of Acceptance

In the summer of 1965, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH; UNC-Chapel Hill) witnessed the frst brutal murder and attempted rape of one of its students. At 12:30 p.m. on Friday, July 30, 21-year-old Suellen Evans was attacked in the Arboretum as she was walking to Cobb dormitory. According to reports from the student newspaper, Te Daily Tar Heel (DTH), Evans put up a struggle but was stabbed in the neck and the heart, dying shortly thereafer. Stunned and heartbroken by the murder, the Chapel Hill and UNC-CH communities came together to hunt Evans’s killer. Two hundred students gathered to search the Arboretum for the murder weapon; the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen appropriated extra funds to allow the police department to expand its search for possible suspects; and local businessman Paul Robertson began collecting contributions for a reward fund.1 But these eforts were to no avail. In 1978 the DTH reported that afer 13 years and despite hundreds of leads, the Chapel Hill police had yet to close the Evans case, and that feelings of confusion, sadness, and fear lingered on campus.2 Te case remains unsolved.

1 Ernest Robl, “Prime suspect found, not charged,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 5, 1965, 1. 2 Beverly Mills, “Campus murders: Killings at UNC, State remain unsolved,” The Daily Tar Heel, January 31, 1978, 4. 92 Margaret Foster

Evans’s murder was a seminal moment in the university’s history, because it was the case on which the school based its rape prevention strategies. With much of today’s research on college rape and pointing to the predominance of acquaintance and serial rape over stranger rape, it is easy to see the inefectiveness of the policies and prevention eforts that universities and their students implemented in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.3 Yet these policies made sense to those who instituted them. For UNC-CH students and ofcials, there was a reason that young women needed to beware: a 21-year-old woman was violently attacked in broad daylight, on campus, for no apparent reason. Moreover, the community presumed that her assailant was an outsider to the once safe and sheltered campus. Te murder put the university on high alert. While school ofcials were undoubtedly concerned about the safety of their female students, they also were concerned with admissions numbers.4 As Miriam Slifin, founder of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro (later the Orange County) , noted about the “cover up” of a rape on campus just a few years afer Evans's murder, parents would never send their daughters to the school if they knew that the risk of being raped existed.5 Likewise, students were haunted by an unsolved murder and the possibility of becoming the next Suellen Evans. Because Evans chose to take a shortcut through an unkempt arboretum full of potential hiding places, she served as an example of what could happen to women who were not careful in all places and at all times.

3 The Research Triangle Institute’s “College Sexual Assault Study,” funded by the US Department of Justice in 2007, found that of the sexual assault victims surveyed, the majority of their assailants had been men they knew and not strangers (xviii). David Lisak and Paul M. Miller’s study, “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” published in Violence and Victims in 2002, found that only a small percentage of the men surveyed committed a majority of the , and the men within that small percentage averaged 5.8 rapes each. Both of these studies indicate a much higher prevalence of and serial rape on college campuses than stranger rape. 4 Much like UNC-CH did after the murder of Evans, education reporter Craig Brandon argues that colleges “take well-publicized steps” aimed at stranger rape, such as blue lights and escort services. They are more reluctant, however, to deal with for fear of “developing a public reputation as a high rape campus” that would deter women from applying. Brandon also argues that schools routinely use the confidentiality laws of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to “cover up crimes committed on college campuses.” Craig Brandon, The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 98, 126. 5 Interview with Miriam Slifkin by Emily W. Madison, October 17, 1994, G-0150, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 93 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

For more than a decade afer Evans’s murder, the community continued to view rape as an external threat and a personal safety issue for women who did not take enough precautions. Tis defnition of the problem suited both administrators and students, because it shielded the former from liability and the latter from fear, as long as the university provided students with safety measures and students took heed of them. Tus, the majority of rape awareness work at UNC-CH, and on many other college campuses during this time, focused on a defnition of the problem that everyone could agree upon: stranger rape. But that defnition led to solutions that ofen did more to perpetuate rape myths than to combat rape itself. Indeed, the community’s narrow defnition of the problem and equally narrow range of solutions excluded all other perpetrators besides deranged strangers and all other victims besides incautious women. Tis article examines the emergence and evolution of rape prevention as an activist issue at UNC-CH in the 1970s and early 1980s. Using documents from archives at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and reportage in Te Daily Tar Heel, this article examines how and why students, university and city ofcials, and the media framed the issue solely as stranger rape—that is, an act of rape committed by an assailant unknown to the victim—and how this defnition shaped the rape awareness and prevention tactics that students endorsed and employed at the time. Tis article also analyzes the faws in the stranger rape model, namely that such a model perpetuates rape myths, leads people to advocate solutions that do little to combat stranger rape, and neglects the existence and prevalence of date and acquaintance rape. While feminists and activists in the national anti-rape movement during this time worked to change public policy, reform laws, and dispel rape myths that were rife with racism, sexism, and victim blaming, college ofcials and students worked within a uniquely constructed and highly insulated space to protect female students. Teir defnition of rape and proposals for its prevention were much diferent from those of the national movement, and they led to diferent outcomes.

94 Margaret Foster

The title slide from a 1975 rape prevention presentation at UNC-CH sponsored by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Center and the Association for Women Students. (Image courtesy of Duke University Libraries.)

Te Association for Women Students Takes on Stranger Danger At 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 28, 1975, several freshman women entered Room 204 of the Carolina Union, the home of UNC-CH’s student organizations and governing bodies, and began taking their seats.6 It was Orientation Week, a time that usually was flled with fun activities but recently had begun to include warnings and precautions geared toward new students, especially women. On this particular Tuesday, a rape crisis presentation was being put on by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Center and the Association for Women Students (AWS). As the last few women took their seats, an older student turned on a projector and dimmed the lights, as a voiceover intoned: “Chapel Hill: Te Southern Part of Heaven. A cosmopolitan village. One week here and you feel like you’ve lived here all your life. Rape: an ugly word. An act of violence. Aggression. Terror. It happens in big cities. It can’t happen to me, not here. Can it?”7 So began the slide presentation 'Lady Beware', a rape education project that former AWS chairpersons Jamie Ellis and Susan Case created in the

6 “Freshman orientation schedule,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 25, 1975, sec. B, 7. 7 Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Newsletter, March 1976, Box 8, Miriam Slifkin Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 95 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

summer of 1974. Te ‘Lady Beware’ script was intentionally dramatic. Its purpose was, as the Te Daily Tar Heel put it, “to remind campus coeds that women are raped in Chapel Hill.”8 Ellis noted that she and Case used local images in the presentation in order to provide viewers with a “constant reminder that it can happen here.”9 In creating 'Lady Beware', members of the AWS were attempting to address the ignorance about and denial of rape in Chapel Hill that they perceived to be rife within the student body. 'Lady Beware' was the epitome of UNC-CH’s early anti-rape movement. With its cautionary title, sensational narration, and all-too- familiar images, it was a successful scare tactic. Tis was the theme of rape awareness on college campuses in the 1970s: all women were potential rape victims, and every dark alley, unlit parking lot, dingy bar, or wooded area was a potential danger zone.10 Te majority of anti-rape work during this time was not so much organized activism as it was an attempt to raise awareness. Students, health care workers, police ofcers, and university ofcials aimed to prevent stranger rape by focusing on security, , and a rhetoric of fear. 'Lady Beware' was also a pivotal moment in the history of anti-rape activism at UNC-CH because it was the frst major efort by undergraduate students to address the issue of rape and sexual assault in Chapel Hill and to unite women on campus through education and awareness. But the slide presentation was also critical because it led the university community to a frmly established defnition of the problem: stranger rape. Although the AWS created 'Lady Beware' primarily for orientation in the fall of 1975, student organizations, resident advisors (RAs), and sororities continued to screen the flm throughout the semester, and AWS included it in all of their women’s programs for at least another year.11 Te slideshow

8 “Rape slide presentation,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 25, 1975, sec. A, 2. 9 Ibid. 10 As Maria Bevacqua notes in her book about rape policy, university administrators did not have to deal with the issue of rape until it became a part of the “wider systemic agenda” and were thus further behind—in terms of accurately defining and responding to rape—politicians and national feminists and activists. According to Bevacqua, “The administrative response to the growing concern about rape … was to enhance the security of women on campus.” Therefore, while feminists were establishing rape crisis centers, lobbying legislators to reform rape laws, and dispelling antiquated notions of rape, college students and administrators were tailoring their solutions to the climate of a college campus. Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 114-116, 136-138. 11 Charlene Havnaer, “AWS to concentrate on ERA, rape, health,” The Daily Tar Heel, September 29, 1976, 4. 96 Margaret Foster

ofered what was considered at the time to be helpful “do’s and don’ts about responding to an attack.”12 But there was an underlying implication that women would only have themselves to blame if they did not heed the warnings. Such an implication established another recurring theme that appeared throughout much of the university’s and AWS’s rape awareness eforts over the next decades: the danger of rape was always present and women were responsible for reducing their own vulnerability to it. In its 1972-1973 budget request, the AWS stated that the purpose of the association was to “involve women in life at this university in ways that will prepare them to be active concerned citizens of the world,” “to examine the status of women in society and at this university,” and “to coordinate matters pertaining to the welfare of women students.”13 As the only organization on campus devoted solely to women, the AWS was the primary resource for female students regarding the issues of rape and sexual assault.14 With consistent funding from student government and a breadth of connections to both on-campus and of-campus groups, AWS was able to act as an umbrella organization that provided women with the what it viewed as the information necessary to ensure women's safety and success at UNC-CH. In 1972, the Ofce of the Dean of Women met its demise, while the number of female students climbed to over 30 percent of the student body.15 Te AWS thus was able to take over the centralization of resources for women as their

12 Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Newsletter, March 1976, Box 8, Miriam Slifkin Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 13 1972-1973 Budget Request for the Association of Women Students, Box 18, Collection 40169, Student Government of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Records, 1919-2011, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 14 Rape and sexual assault were not, however, the sole focus of the AWS. For several years the organization issued a handbook for women that included discussions on contraception and pregnancy, nutrition, women in the arts, political groups, discrimination, athletics, and women studies. The organization held self-defense workshops and film screenings, helped fund the women’s issues magazine SHE, and brought in female speakers. While early records of the AWS do not indicate any political or radical leanings, the organization held an event during the 1979-1980 school year called “What is a Feminist,” noting, “The word feminist has bad connotations of most students. AWS feels it is important to educate students to the positive nature of being a feminist, which means in part, being proud of womanhood.” While the original intent of the AWS was to ease the transfer of female students when UNC-CH became fully co-ed in the 1960s, throughout the 1970s the organizations adopted a stronger tone of female empowerment. 1979-1980 Budget Request for the Association of Women Students, Box 18, Collection 40169, Student Government Records, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 15 Pamela Dean, Women on the Hill: A History of Women at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: Division of Student Affairs, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987), 16. 97 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

presence on campus grew. Troughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the AWS employed a variety of tactics to raise awareness about rape and sexual assault. One year afer producing 'Lady Beware', undergraduate student Sallie Shuping and the AWS published a booklet titled Rape: A Sourcebook for Carolina Women. By 1979, the AWS had already printed 1,600 copies and the organization had requested funds for a third reprint, indicating a high demand on campus for information on rape. Members of the association distributed the booklet to all dormitory resident advisors. In its request for printing funds, the AWS described the booklet as outlining “preventive measures, laws, statistics, the emergency reporting system, callbox locations, medical/therapeutic resources for victims, police and legal aid information.”16 In a letter written to the UNC-CH Campus Governing Council, Detective Maureen E. Kelly of the Carrboro Police Department urged the student government to continue providing funds for printing. As she noted, “Te AWS booklet dealing with the topic of sexual assault is an excellent publication, particularly well suited to the student population. I have ofen utilized and recommended this booklet, feeling it to be the best of its kind in this community.”17 Te stated justifcation of the rape booklet was that “several rapes occurred in Chapel Hill” in 1978, and that there existed an alarming “frequency of rape.” Tis suggests that at this point college women were less concerned about rape law reform and legal aid information than their own personal safety.18 Indeed, in a DTH article about the AWS booklet, Chapel Hill Crime and Prevention Training Ofcer R.V. Pendergraph seemed more inclined to ofer women advice than information, noting, “Women should not walk alone in dimly lighted paths, should remain in the car with the doors locked if her car breaks down … and should have keys ready when reaching home,” because the rapist “is waiting for the privacy to commit the act.” For these reasons, “a woman must not aford him that privacy.”19 Although the rape booklet was an important resource on a legitimate danger, the way in which students and members of the Chapel Hill community framed the issue set a tone of victim-blaming that remained

16 1979-1980 Budget Request for the Association of Women Students, Box 18, Collection 40169, Student Government Records, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 17 Detective Maureen Kelly to UNC-CH Campus Governing Council, March 26, 1979, Box 18, Collection 40169, Student Government Records, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 18 1979-1980 Budget Request for the Association of Women Students. 19 Mary Anne Rhyne, “AWS booklet, police officer precautions to women: Rape danger increases at beginning of semester,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 24, 1978, D4. 98 Margaret Foster

throughout much of the rape awareness work of the next several years.

Rape Prevention Programs (for Women) Begin Facing an infux of new students unfamiliar with the social environment of college, it is hardly surprising that UNC-CH’s Orientation Week witnessed the peak of rape awareness and rape prevention information in the late 1970s.20 As the AWS encouraged young women to pick up a copy of its rape booklet during the frst week of classes, the organization also prepared for its co-sponsorship of the 1978-1979 Union Forum Committee, the cohort of students that chose the school’s special guest lecturers each year. Te opening lecture that year was a forum on rape prevention presented by Frederic Storaska, founder of the National Rape and Assault Prevention Center and author of How to Say No to a Rapist … and Survive.21 Storaska’s program began with a very diferent message than that of ‘Lady Beware.’ 22 Storaska admonished a society built on male dominance and aggression and asserted that only total equality between the sexes would make possible the end of all rape. He also dismissed prevalent rape myths, including the idea that women provoke rape. “You could crawl around campus in a cardboard box and provoke some men … nothing justifes rape,” he said.23 But despite Storaska’s call for equality, he made no mention of men’s roles in rape prevention. Tis lack of any parallel sexual assault education for men was not uncommon at the time.24

20 In 1963 a little more than 2000 women were enrolled at UNC-CH. By 1972 female students numbered 6500, making up over 30 percent of the student body, and by 1976 women outnumbered men in the freshman class for the first time in the school’s history. This rapid rise in the number of women at UNC-CH occurred simultaneously with the dissolution of the Office of the Dean of Women and the concomitant strict rules of Dean Catherine Carmichael in the early 1970s, leaving the safety of female students in the hands of students themselves and resulting in the emergence of student-led rape awareness initiatives. Dean, Women on the Hill, 17-25. 21 “First Union forum on rape prevention,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 24, 1978, C2. 22 Susan Ladd, “Rape prevention: A humanistic approach to defuse a violent act,” The Daily Tar Heel, August 31, 1978, 1. 23 Ibid. 24 Scholars Martin D. Schwartz and Walter S. Dekeseredy note that in researching sexual assault and the role of male peer support, they “never heard of a college or university that put out an instruction sheet for men on campus.” Dekeseredy and Schwartz, Sexual Assault on the College Campus: The Role of Male Peer Support (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 142. At UNC-CH, there was no male equivalent to the AWS to promote rape awareness and prevention. Rape prevention strategies that are mentioned later in this article did not generally target men. For instance, the “Coed Anxiety Map” surveyed only female students. Students and other activists did not begin to address the role of men in rape prevention until later in the 1980s, when the issue of date rape emerged and more conversations began to address communication and consent. 99 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Storaska’s program may have been well intentioned, but it quickly shifed from an informative to an entertaining tone, with questionable recommendations backed by unsubstantiated evidence. His principal piece of advice for women confronted with a rapist was to treat the rapist like a human being, because “to fght the rapist you have to understand him.” He insisted that women were “only limited by [their] imagination” and suggested such tactics as fondling the rapist, vomiting on the rapist, faking epilepsy, or even something more serious. “Cancer, particularly leukemia, seems to work well,” he explained to the audience.25 In a letter written by a member of the Michigan Women’s Task Force on Rape and reprinted in the 1975 Feminists Alliance Against Rape (FAAR) Newsletter, author Jan BenDor accused Storaska of a “dangerous fraud” for using “insulting and dangerous advice” that contradicted respected research and victim testimony.26 Te letter also asserted that Storaska’s fraud was being “unwittingly abetted by the speakers’ programs of colleges and universities” that hired him seemingly without researching his credentials and despite controversies he lef in his wake.27 Such was the case at UNC-CH. Tree years afer FAAR’s attempt to warn university women against Storaska, both the Carolina Union and the AWS helped sponsor his lecture. Te decision to open the 1978-1979 lecture series with Storaska illustrated the school’s perception of rape prevention as a university priority, but it also refected the unwillingness of the university and its students to view the problem through a more analytical lens rather than simply addressing the issue of women’s safety from a man’s perspective. Much of the rape awareness and rape prevention work during this time revolved around the theme of stranger rape, but it tended to send women mixed messages when it came to suggested tactics and advice. Two years

25 Ladd, “Rape prevention: A humanistic approach to defuse a violent act.” 26 In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller included in her chapter “Victims: The Crime” several testimonies of rape victims to demonstrate the varied behavior of women during the act of rape, in order to disprove the notion that women are more likely to survive if they either fight back or submit to the rapist. Storaska encouraged women to both treat the rapist like a human and to get creative when attempting to stop the rape, but the testimonies in Against Our Will suggest that many women were too shocked to even comprehend their situation. Furthermore, women who thought submission would be their best way out were no luckier than those who fought back. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993). 27 Jan BenDor, “How To Say NO To Storaska,” Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter Jan/Feb/Mar 1975, Archives of the Feminist Alliance Against Rape and Aegis Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women, www.faar-aegis.org/JanFebMar_75/storaska_ janfebmar75.html. 100 Margaret Foster

afer Fred Storaska encouraged women to take control during an attempted rape, an undergraduate student encouraged women to rely on men for protection instead. In 1980, the AWS requested $200 from the student government to provide funding for a new student organization that had been formed to “combat the rising number of sexual assaults in the Chapel Hill area.”28 Undergraduate Joe Buckner established the organization, which he named the Rape and Assault Prevention Escort (abbreviated as R.A.P.E.), afer learning about several women being assaulted on campus. Te service began on the night of Sunday, February 3, and received 10 calls. Tat semester, R.A.P.E. had 120 volunteers who escorted women to on-campus locations from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., Sunday through Tursday.29

While ‘Lady Beware’ and the AWS In 1980, a new UNC-CH student handbook on rape provided women organization with the unfortunate acronym of R.A.P.E. (Rape Assault with safety advice on how to avoid rape, Prevention Escort) was founded to provide male escorts for women R.A.P.E. ofered a more tangible means walking to locations on campus. (Image courtesy of Wilson Library, UNC-CH.) of preventing sexual assault in the form of physical protection. According to a survey conducted by a UNC-CH Speech class in the spring of 1980, 85 percent of students (from a sample of 230) were concerned with campus security and 71.5 percent of women admitted to restricting nighttime activities for this reason. In the same survey, 85 percent of students deemed R.A.P.E. to be a valuable safety measure that should continue to operate on campus.30 Indeed, by the following spring the service had expanded to the university’s

28 R APE Brochure, Box 14, Collection 40128, Carolina Union of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Records, 1931-2012, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 29 Joey Holleman, “Escort service provides protection for women,” The Daily Tar Heel, February 5, 1980, 1. 30 Melodee Alves, “Rape escort service expands,” The Daily Tar Heel, April 17, 1980, 1-2. 101 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

South Campus and boasted a total of 455 volunteers who began working on Friday and Saturday nights in addition to weeknights.31 Te service operated through the use of a central telephone number. When a woman called the number, a resident advisor at one of the two branches of R.A.P.E. would respond to her call based on her destination. Te RA would then give the woman the name of her male escort, who would greet her with his student ID upon arrival at her location. According to R.A.P.E.’s South Campus director Bobby Jenkins, RAs were responsible for screening each R.A.P.E. escort and for answering the phone, recording the time of the call, the caller’s name and location, and the escort’s name.32 Trough word of mouth, coverage in the DTH, phone stickers, and pamphlets, R.A.P.E. became the most conspicuous and active rape prevention efort undertaken by students, many of whom were unwilling to wait for the university to respond to a growing concern on campus. As Joe Buckner told DTH staf writer Sherri Boles, R.A.P.E. was “a very good example of how UNC students can take a problem and solve it for themselves.”33 Providing women with an alternative to walking alone at night was an important example of early student anti-rape activism at UNC-CH, but R.A.P.E. was not without its faws. Although the organization—which changed its name to Students Averting Frightening Encounters (SAFE) in 1987—eventually opened its volunteer base to women and its clientele base to men, for seven years it actively recruited only male escorts for a service that was geared exclusively toward female students.34 R.A.P.E.’s ofcers failed to recognize the irony of attempting to prevent rape and assault of women by male strangers by placing women in the sole company of male strangers. With its emphasis on women’s safety and campus security, R.A.P.E. fell under the type of campus rape response that scholars Martin D. Schwartz and Walter S. Dekeseredy describe as “perpetuating the myth of stranger rape,” sending women an “incorrect message about the places where they should be concerned” and creating an “unhealthy dependence”

31 Sherri Boles, “R.A.P.E. expands to South Campus,” The Daily Tar Heel, September 21, 1981, 4. 32 Alves, “Rape escort service expands.” 33 Boles, “R.A.P.E. expands to South Campus.” 34 Until 1987, all of R.A.P.E.’s applications for university recognition stated that the purpose of the service was to provide women, not students, with an alternative to walking alone at night. It seems that with the realization that calling a rape prevention service RAPE was questionable to say the least came the realization that all students should be protected from rape and assault. 102 Margaret Foster

on a system that was addressing a threat that was far less likely than that of date or acquaintance rape.35 Rape awareness and education on crime at the university in the mid- to late-1970s and early 1980s was not limited to students and student organizations. In 1981, the UNC-CH Geography Department created the “UNC Coed Anxiety Map.” Te map was based on data collected from a questionnaire flled out by 127 female students. Te survey highlighted the areas on campus that women feared most, in the hopes that the university would make safety improvements based on the responses. Among the areas on campus “where Coeds are uneasy being alone afer dark,” the Arboretum and Forest Teater were two of the places of highest anxiety.36 Janet Colm, director of the Rape Crisis Center, and Sergeant W.L. Dunn of the University Police, noted that neither the Rape Crisis Center nor campus police had received any reports of rape on campus that year. However, Geography Department Chairman Dr. Richard Kopec defended the value of such a map, saying, “Tese women’s perceptions are as real to them as information of an actual rape. To be afraid, real or imagined, is still to be afraid.”37 Dr. Kopec’s words were emblematic of the model of rape awareness that students and administrators were intent on using, despite its evident inefectiveness. Janet Colm, a former member of Chapel Hill’s National Organization for Women (NOW) and director of the Rape Crisis Center at the time, was more attuned to the national dialogue on rape that was beginning to move away from the movement’s initial fxation on deviant stranger rapists. She doubted the usefulness of the anxiety map, lamenting that “all rape information seems to be oriented toward ‘don’t walk alone at night’ when much of it occurs in situations where you feel safe.”38 Asking women about which places they feared most meant that the university could assuage their fears with quick and easy solutions, like installing more lights and cutting down hedges. Te stranger rape/fear model satisfed students because they were able to convince themselves that they could never be raped as long as they were smart and cautious. At the same time, it satisfed the university

35 Dekeseredy and Schwartz, Sexual Assault on the College Campus, 139. 36 The shading is difficult to see in the map that was reprinted in the DTH. Although the buildings appear black, they do not represent areas of high anxiety. If one looks closely, there are elements of visible shading near the Arboretum, Forest Theater, Granville Towers, and the area to the right of Kenan Stadium. 37 Beverly Weaver, “Rape threat: Map shows campus spots women fear,” The Daily Tar Heel, September 29, 1981, 1. 38 Ibid. 103 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

In 1981, the UNC-CH Geography Department created a map based on data collected from 127 female students. The map highlights areas on campus that women in the survey most feared. (Image courtesy of the DTH.)

because it freed the school from institutional responsibility in cases of rape, as long as it implemented new safety measures every so ofen. Te result of a student body and a university too reluctant to confront the reality of rape was an almost decade-long series of rape awareness projects that did more to allay imagined fear than to prevent rape. Tough the AWS rape booklet, the Fred Storaska lecture, the R.A.P.E. service, and the “UNC Coed Anxiety Map” represent a wide range of rape awareness tactics, they articulated the same message to students: rape happened in Chapel Hill. Tis was not, strictly speaking, incorrect. Rape did indeed happen to women in Chapel Hill, as it happened to women in towns and cities throughout the country. Rape was, as feminist Susan Grifn called it, “Te All-American Crime,” referring

104 Margaret Foster

to the patriarchal system responsible for creating an “atmosphere of violence” and male dominance that made rape so pervasive.39 But as Maria Bevacqua notes, feminists and activists involved in the national anti-rape movement had a much more comprehensive understanding of the crime than did most people.40 Indeed, initiatives such as R.A.P.E and the “UNC Coed Anxiety Map” were not intentionally sending women a misleading message. Tat Joe Buckner and his cohort of male escorts wanted to protect women indicates that the emphasis on stranger rather than acquaintance rape was not just a result of school administrators seeking justifcation for simpler safety measures and reduced liability. It was also a result of what was, at the time, a mindset so common it went unquestioned: women could not be raped by boyfriends, husbands, or any type of “date” or “acquaintance,” because sexual intercourse in these relationships was a given and consent was never in question. While date and acquaintance rape were, as Schwartz and Dekeseredy point out, technically more common, Chapel Hill residents and students could not confront an issue that they had yet to even acknowledge. Te ubiquitous threat of rape had made individuals like Susan Grifn and Susan Brownmiller begin to question the rapist’s nature rather than the victim’s faults. But the insular nature of a college town, compounded by the sexist vestiges of the previous decade—when males dominated every campus space and female students were still being watched by the Dean of Women and ruled by a strict code of conduct—was slower to realize a broader understanding of rape.

Rape in UNC-Chapel Hill's Campus Media In the early 1970s, national media coverage of rape, which had previously focused almost exclusively on black men accused of raping white women, shifed to episodic stories that brought attention to the “systematic and structural obstacles” that victims faced afer reporting their rape, thematic stories that presented the victim’s account of the crime, and coverage of the national anti-rape movement.41 Media coverage of rape in Chapel Hill was not quite as thorough, but as the primary news outlet for many

39 Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” Ramparts Magazine, September 1971, 26-35. 40 Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda, 137. 41 Ibid., 122-125. 105 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

UNC-CH students throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Te Daily Tar Heel was an especially important source of information regarding rape and sexual assault in Chapel Hill.42 Te newspaper regularly featured advertisements for the Rape Crisis Center (RCC), frequently published articles written by RCC staf members, and diligently reported rapes and sexual assaults that occurred in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. For many years, though, it also promoted the myth of stranger rape, contributed to an environment of fear by employing sensational language and highlighting violent attacks, and encouraged the university to implement superfcial safety measures, all of which ultimately resulted in a false sense of security and the dissemination of misinformation on rape and sexual assault. On September 9, 1973, a UNC-CH freshman was kidnapped at knifepoint in the Bell Tower parking lot and was then driven to Chatham County, where she was raped.43 A week later the DTH responded with an editorial titled “Shorter hedge would be safer.” Te article expressed frustration with the university’s lack of concern for student safety and suggested that the administration consider improving the lighting and trimming the shrubbery around the Bell Tower, because “removing this cover would curb these ghastly assaults.”44 Four months later, when a student was raped near Kenan Stadium, DTH editor Susan Miller rebuked the administration for failing to consider the previously mentioned suggestions and continuing to address the threat of rape by merely sending out memos afer the fact. “It is now quite obvious that the administration neither cares nor is inclined to take any positive steps to end the threat of attack on campus,” Miller wrote.45 Miller began her piece with an argument that was more consistent with contemporary feminist anti-rape rhetoric than the school’s outdated stranger rape rhetoric, noting that “women are raped for numerous and complicated reasons mostly relating to the sexist orientation of our society.” She ended the piece by asking the university to take “more substantive

42 Because rape and sexual assault were not yet a part of the campus dialogue in the 1960s, it is difficult to determine whether students and activists at UNC-CH in the 1970s were strengthening their awareness efforts because rapes were actually increasing or because there was a perception that rapes were increasing due to news sources like the DTH beginning to report them. 43 Lu Ann Jones, “UNC woman assaulted,” The Daily Tar Heel, September 12, 1973, 1. 44 “Shorter hedge would be safer,” The Daily Tar Heel, September 17, 1973, 6. 45 “Rape Memos won’t lessen administration’s guilt,” The Daily Tar Heel, January 9, 1974, 8. 106 Margaret Foster

steps … to end the increasing incident of rape.”46 However, her prescription once again included installing better lighting and trimming shrubs, steps that were limited to the danger of attacks by non-campus community members—a danger that, despite the December 14 assault, was infrequent.47 Indeed, in a letter to the editor written the following week, a community reader scolded the DTH editor for doing a “grave disservice” by creating “in the minds of DTH readers a simplistic approach to control of crime via lighting and low shrubbery.”48 Although administrators and students across the country were concerned with improving security for women on campus, not all students or community members bought into the efectiveness of reducing the number of trees and increasing the number of lights.49 Te student newspaper’s coverage of rape not only upheld the stranger rape myth, it also featured one-sided rape prevention articles that focused solely on the steps that women needed to take in their daily lives to avoid being raped. Furthermore, the paper continued the pattern of rape dialogue centered around a strange man lurking in the dark and waiting to pounce on his next oblivious victim. A 1974 front-page story titled “Rape: Preventive steps can thwart increasing rate of assaults” began with a hypothetical tale about a girl named Kathi:

Te lock on the back door of the dress shop clicked shut and Kathi walked to the parking lot, searching through her handbag for her car keys. Tat’s when she heard the footsteps—heavy, shufing, as if the person wore cumbersome hiking boots. Out

46 Ibid. 47 Kent State University psychologist Mary Koss found in her 1985 study that women raped by a stranger are more likely to report the crime to the police, but that victims of what she called “hidden rape,” that is the more than 50 percent of rape cases that are not reported to anyone, were much more likely to be raped by an acquaintance or romantic partner than a stranger. Mary P. Koss, “The Hidden Rape Victim: Personality, Attitudinal, and Situational Characteristics,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 9 (1985): 193, 206. 48 Sylvia King, Letter to the Editor, “Reader claims Tar Heel’s rape editorial misinformed,” The Daily Tar Heel, January 14, 1974, 6. 49 In a letter to the editor, Dean of Student Affairs Donald A. Boulton responded to the The Daily Tar Heel’s editorial (“Boulton responds on rape, January 11, 1974), stating that campus “walking tours” had indeed resulted in increased lighting, a survey was sent to women students to ask which areas needed more lighting, bus schedules were sent to faculty members who taught evening classes, an escort program had been implemented by the Residence Hall Association (although it lasted less than a year), and warnings about the danger of walking alone at night were communicated through resident advisors, the DTH, and the local radio. Despite these measures, the number of reported rapes and assaults did not noticeably decrease in the following months or years, presumably because they were addressing the wrong problem. 107 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of the corner of her eye, she saw the man in a ski mask reaching for her. She ran, but his shadow clung to her, his feet pounded the wet asphalt at her heels. She stumbled, fell, rolled against the curb and then lay mute. She didn’t have a chance.50

Tough the article reads like pulp fction, the author insisted, “Te circumstances of the story are true.” Despite refuting the myth that women enticed rapists with immodest dress and behavior, King then insinuated that women’s increasing independence was a likely factor in the recent rise in reports of rapes. By stating that in attending nighttime lectures and labs women were putting themselves at greater risk of being assaulted, the author implied that women should not strive for greater independence but should restrict their movement and even their academic pursuits in order to decrease their risk.51 Te “Preventive steps” article dispelled the notion that there was only one type of rapist by citing research about “normal” men who rape, but unsubstantiated assertions repeatedly overshadowed the usefulness of the research it presented. Furthermore, the article was highly critical of its imaginary victim, asserting, “A little education would have helped Kathi keep her cool and know what to do when she was attacked. A little care could have prevented the situation entirely.” Te authors further warned, “Because she ignored or didn't know the facts, she thought rape couldn't happen to her. When it did, she could only submit to her own terror.”52 It is a reality that women had to take greater measures to ensure their safety, which is why the rape prevention steps outlined in this article, and in several articles published aferward, were not necessarily misguided. But because such tactics were essentially the only form of rape awareness at the time, they may have done less to reduce rape at UNC-CH than to spread fear, perpetuate sexist attitudes, and promote victim blaming. Even when the DTH was not publicizing rape awareness programs like Fred Storaska’s lecture, its coverage of rape and sexual assault in the community bordered on the sensational and seemed to underscore the idea that stranger rape plagued the university. According to two November 1979 articles, the

50 Diane King, “Rape: Preventive steps can thwart increasing rates of assault,” The Daily Tar Heel, April 1, 1974, 1-2. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 108 Margaret Foster

months of September, October, and November saw a rise in incidences of rape, attempted rape, and sexual assault.53 A man with a gun attacked a woman on campus near Cobb Dormitory and two weeks later a man wielding a block of wood with a blade attached to it attacked a woman near the Bell Tower.54 Neither woman was raped, but the DTH’s emphasis on violence against women demonstrated a consistent pattern, focusing on a specifc danger to a specifc potential victim and ignoring all other possible dangers and victims. Te DTH was undoubtedly an important source of both rape awareness and student activism throughout the early years of the campus anti-rape movement. As the primary news source and student publication on campus, the newspaper played a signifcant role in shaping students’ opinions and perceptions of rape. Although stranger rape did occur, Te Daily Tar Heel’s and the university’s preoccupation with the more easily identifable and thus more easily avoidable rapist lef students in a state of ignorance concerning the danger of acquaintance rape and the cultural and political roots of rape.

A New Understanding of Rape Emerges Although Chapel Hill was still a small town in the 1970s, it was not isolated from the happenings of the outside world. While groups like the New York Radical Feminists and the National Organization for Women (NOW), and individuals like Susan Brownmiller were creating a national rhetoric around rape and sexual assault, residents of Chapel Hill were responding to that rhetoric by tailoring it to their own perceptions of rape and feminism.55 Local activist Miriam Slifin and her leadership within NOW and the Rape Crisis Center illustrated Chapel Hill’s alignment with the national anti-rape movement by focusing on rape crisis centers and rape law reform.56 However, though Chapel Hill was becoming more cosmopolitan, it was still a college town and thus somewhat insulated. While individuals like Slifin had both the mindset and the resources to promote a broader approach to rape, students and administrators at UNC-CH focused on a

53 Anne-Marie Downey, “Assaults in area: Attacks on women increase,” The Daily Tar Heel, November 29, 1979, 3. 54 Debbie Daniel, “Student assaulted; rape, attacks rise,” The Daily Tar Heel, November 16, 1979, 1. 55 The New York Radical Feminists was one of the first groups to have a speak-out against rape. NOW spearheaded the establishment of local rape crisis centers. 56 Bevaqua, Rape on the Public Agenda, 16. 109 Traces | The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

narrower defnition of the problem that they could most easily (though not necessarily efectively) address. A college campus is a unique environment, with its own set of policies, procedures, and government, its own quasi-legal system in the form of the Student Code and Honor Court, its own police and security department, and its own housing. Together these factors create a closed system that serves to protect both the physical safety of campus community members and the university’s reputation. When incidents like the murder of Suellen Evans occurred within the invisible borders of a college campus, they disrupted the equilibrium of the carefully controlled system and forced the school to restore order as swifly as possible. Te insulated and somewhat autonomous nature of a college campus explains why much of the rape awareness work of the time and its adherence to rather than its condemnation of rape myths seemed to stand in stark contrast to the national feminist goal of dispelling such myths and confronting the legal, racial, and cultural aspects of the crime. Evans’s murder was a tragedy. Any university might have taken actions similar to those that UNC-CH took in the wake of this type of crime. But while those involved in raising awareness about rape and sexual assault in Chapel Hill and on campus were well-intentioned in their eforts to bring light to a serious issue, they defned the problem in a way that placed sole responsibility on women and ignored other real and present dangers, including date and acquaintance rape. As Susan Brownmiller argued, in imposing “a special burden of caution on women … not only does the number of potential rapists on the loose remain constant, but the ultimate efect of rape upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act.”57 Afer the nearsightedness of anti-rape activism in the 1970s, the national dialogue on rape began to shif in the 1980s to a more serious discussion of alcohol, fraternities, uncomfortable dating situations, and the undetected rapists present on college campuses. In 1982 a new defnition a rape—one that posited that all men, including those known to victims, could be perpetrators of rape—was formally given a name when Ms. magazine published an article examining the epidemic of campus “date rape.” Although UNC-CH’s campus community struggled throughout the next decade to turn its acknowledgment of this new problem into substantial action, the

57 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 400. 110 Margaret Foster

Though Chapel Hill was becoming more cosmopolitan in the 1970s, it was still a college town and thus somewhat insulated from a national dialogue on rape that was moving away from an understanding of rape centered on assault by strangers. (Photo courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill.) shif in discourse on rape allowed students to connect campus rape to the national movement and to begin moving away from the inefective crime prevention model based on fears of stranger rape. While UNC-CH and universities across the country began to improve victim support services and rape prevention tactics in later years, the school’s fxation on stranger rape throughout the 1970s and early 1980s inculcated the campus anti-rape movement with misconceptions and myths that continued to hinder its progress for decades.

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