Two incidents of sexual violence were reported to the Oberlin Police this week. One awaits an Ohio state trial and the other is currently under investigation by the College as well as Oberlin police.

Women’s Resource Center: The student-initiated center provides a number of services to the Oberlin campus. (photo by Claire-Helene Mershon)

“On Saturday Sept. 15 at approximately 2:48 a.m., the Oberlin Police Department received a call from the College Office of Safety and Security that several of their officers were in North Hall on Union Street with a female who was reporting a sexual assault,” stated the police department’s Incident Report. College security officials transported the complainant to Oberlin Medical Center’s Emergency Room following the incident.
While rumors of the alleged attack have been circulating since Saturday, the case is still under investigation and remains open.
Later in the week the Office of Safety and Security received a call from a student reporting an abusive relationship. After appraising the situation as a case of domestic violence, security called in the Oberlin police. A warrant was issued for domestic violence and the defendant will go on trial this week. He is being held on a $25,000 bond. This incident was the third sexual offense reported on Oberlin’s campus in 2001. Typically, security hears reports of two or three sexual assaults yearly. In most cases both involved parties attend the college and are often acquaintances, but many acknowledged that unreported cases of sexual assault happen on the campus yearly.
“When people know that you are in SAST they talk to you, so between hotline calls, friends and strangers confiding in us, we know that sexual assaults have occurred,” sophomore SAST leader Jesse Carr said.
This semester Carr and senior Jennifer Katz teach the Sexual Assault Support Team (SAST) ExCo. Throughout the semester, the ExCo’s 14 students will learn about sexual assault. Some will be trained to counsel survivors over the anonymous 24-hour hotline that the organization runs. While federal law requires the College to report all cases of sexual assault to the city police, SAST provides confidential support and treatment.
SAST, along with the college, the Lorain County Rape Crisis Center and the police coordinate a sexual assault procedure bound not only by federal law but also college policy. Immediately that chain of events is set into motion.
“When we go in and find that the case matches with descriptions of sexual battery, or other offenses in Ohio Code then we go to the police department because most likely there will be criminal prosecution. But if the sexual offense falls into a gray area then we would go not to the police department but to the college,” Director of Safety and Security Robert Jones said. Because of this ‘grey area’ where one person’s word often collides with another’s and hard evidence is rare, the later hearings and trials that determine guilt in sexual assault cases have proven difficult to arbitrate.
“We are talking about human interaction here, not lab experiments. When you have interpersonal relations it is obvious that you have one perspective, the other party has a different view and you were both there. When you bring in a third party they obviously have a different perspective. Humans are different from science experiments,” the Administrator of the College Sexual Offense Policy Camille Hamlin Mitchell said.
The policy itself more formally outlines the difficulties in judging sexual offenses when it discusses the consent clause that mandates “all sexual interaction between students must be consensual.” The next paragraph goes onto detail that “the term ‘consent’ can not be defined with enough precision to make a definition meaningful for any and/or all situations.”
Last revised in 1999 but reviewed yearly by the College’s student, faculty and staff officiated Sexual Offense Review Committee (SORC), the Sexual Offense Policy and Procedures spends nearly five pages of the College Rules and Regulations guide explaining how sexual offenses are adjudicated within the College community. Also discussed in the policy is the College’s commitment to educating about sexual offenses.
While the policy decrees training for ‘the entire College community” on matters pertaining to sexual offenses, campus security officials are not specifically trained to handle sexual offenses.
“The College supports SAST, but not our mission of supporting and educating the community. I think the College should hire someone whose full time job is to educate the campus community about sexual assault,” Katz said.
And while this grievance arose in last Saturday’s open dialouge on sexual assault and has been an item of contention in the past, workshops and other outlets to learn about the implementation of the policy are increasingly facilitated by the College via Hamlin Mitchell as well as SAST.
“Students love to react when there is an incident but the tendency is to then put sexual assault out of mind. The tendency needs to be to educate ourselves all the time. People need to read the policy. They clamor for more educational opportunities but when opportunities are given people don’t show,” Hamlin Mitchell said.
Last Winter Term Hamlin Mitchell’s administrative branch, the Office of Equity Concerns offered a sexual offense policy project wherein students were given the opportunity to submit a comparative critique of the current policy and create a program designed to educate and outreach the larger campus community. The program did not attract sufficient student interest and was not completed.
“I think the administration in the last few years has been looking for more ways to support survivors and they have made it clear that they are looking for ways to change. However there is a long way to go,” Katz said.
Sexual Offense Policy Information sessions will be offered: 7:15-8:15 p.m. in Carnegie 211 on Sept. 24, Oct. 8, 17,31 and Nov. 7 and 14.