Like many freshman girls in 2005 at SMU, Brittany Gonzalez attended a fraternity party with one of her friends. At the party, Gonzalez met a guy who seemed like a perfect gentleman. He offered to buy her a drink and later even offered to drive her back to her dorm room.
But Gonzalez never remembered the ride home. Instead, she awoke the next morning in an unfamiliar hotel room. The guy who seemed like such a gentleman had sexually assaulted her after drugging her drink at the party.
Gonzalez, along with about 80 percent of women who are sexually assaulted, according to the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, did not report the incident to police. In fact, she didn’t tell anyone because she was embarrassed and didn’t have many friends yet at SMU.
“I felt like it was my fault and that I just let it happen,” said Gonzalez. “I just let him go buy me a drink.”
Like a lot of underage college students, Gonzalez was afraid to go to the SMU Police Department for help. he was also unaware that SMU offered counseling for victims of sexual assault in the Health Center. It wasn’t until a year later when Gonzalez was attacked by a man on the SMU boulevard that SMU police officers referred her to the counseling center.
“SMU doesn’t make their services known. I didn’t know where to go or who to go talk to after it happened,” said Gonzalez.
Unlike many colleges such as Syracuse University, Yale University and the University of Maryland, SMU does not have a rape center or a designated place on campus where victims of sexual assault can seek help. Instead, SMU has a fragmented system that divides the responsibility of assisting sexual assault victims among several agencies and departments.
The Dean of Student Life, the Women’s Center, the Health Center, and the SMU Police Department collectively work together to educate students about sexual assault and to help victims after an attack. However, each of these organizations is located in different buildings on campus and has responsibilities other than counseling sexual assault victims.
During a five-year college career, one in five women experience rape, according to a National Institute of Justice report issued in 2005. SMU does not have a sexual assault program nor is there a specific SMU official in charge of orchestrating sexual assault programs on campus. Because of this, many students say they are unaware of what to do after being sexually assaulted and are clueless about where to find help.
“How do (students) know where to go?” asked Karen Click, the director of the Women’s Center. “Well, I think that this is a huge concern that the university is aware of and trying to work on. We are very good in our little areas for different aspects, but how do we pull that message together?”
Dean of Student Life at SMU Dee Siscoe said that having separate departments is beneficial because they can get the information out to more students.
“I think it’s a positive that we don’t have just one person,” said Siscoe. “One person can’t be visible to all people.”
But for students, information on sexual assault is not easy to find. Gonzalez said she thinks SMU is trying to protect its image by not advertising help for sexual assault victims.
“If prospective students and parents are touring SMU campus, the last thing they want to see is advertising for rape counseling,” she said.
Siscoe said that SMU is not trying to hide the number of sexual assaults on campus.
“We post crime stats on the Web and in the student handbook, so I don’t think that we are trying to hide anything,” said Siscoe. “If we provide a service, of course we want to promote it.”
Toni Martinez, a senior at SMU, said the only place she has ever seen information is on the crime alerts posted around campus. These flyers are posted only if the police department thinks the student body is in danger of a sexual predator.
“I guess I would look on the Internet to see what I would do if something happened to me,” said senior Kelly Smith. “But other than that, I have no idea where I would go.”
When the words sexual assault or rape are entered as keywords in a search on the SMU Web site, the Health Center’s Web site is the fourth and fifth result. If the keywords Health Center are typed into the search, another search to find information on sexual assault has to be performed to find out what to do after a sexual assault has occurred.
For most people in a time of crisis, this is a long time to wait for results. Click said there is currently no specific plan to make that information more accessible to students.
But Cathey Soutter, counselor for sexual assault victims at SMU, said plans are being made to address this.
“One thing we have talked about is getting a link. When someone looks at the Women’s Center (Web site) they will immediately get a link to sexual assault and contact numbers,” said Soutter.
Soutter has proposed several ideas to improve the handling of sexual assaults on campus, but some of her efforts have been turned down or have not been as successful as she hoped. For example, Soutter said she attempted to put up flyers in SMU’s bathroom stalls that provided her number as a contact in case of sexual assault. SMU turned down the idea for fear that students would write on them.
Click and Soutter both said that SMU would benefit from new sexual assault programs. But it is easier said than done. They said that the idea of anonymous forms victims could fill out and mail in would be beneficial to SMU. The numbers of approximately how many women are assaulted each year would be more accurately portrayed. This would encourage more women to seek help or file a report.
SMU Police Sgt. Rodriguez said she is working on getting a better Web site, but getting a Web page designer to do it is difficult. Right now she is trying to get together “care” kits to help victims feel more comfortable after a sexual assault. When an incident occurs, the victim is transported to Parkland Hospital in Dallas where she is stripped of her clothes for DNA testing. The Care Kits will contain new clothes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and deodorant. But she needs funding to complete this and many other projects.
“Everyone has the misconception that there is a lot of money (at SMU), but there’s not. So some of the programs we want to do, we need to get funding for,” said Rodriguez.
She said that because SMU is a private university, it has problems obtaining government grants. For example, Rodriguez said SMU applied for a grant regarding Violence Against Women from the U.S. Department of Justice. It would have helped fund new programming for the sexual assault problem on campus.
Currently, Rodriguez said SMU has not applied for any more grants to address the problem of sexual assaults.
“Larger universities can usually get (grants), but they have the funds to get people to write those grants for them,” she said.
Rodriguez said that there are many ideas she has for addressing the sexual assault problems on campus.
“It’s just working around it to get it done with limited resources,” said Rodriguez pointing to the Care Kit beside her desk.
Dean Siscoe said that funding is not a big issue at SMU. If an organization or a student group has an idea, there is a link on the Dean of Student Life Office Web site for program requests.
“Fill out the form and ask for the money,” she said. “I will find a way to help fund it.”
Siscoe said SMU is always looking for unique, additional ways to get out information for resources on sexual assault.
“I regret that (some students) don’t know where to go,” she said. “That means we need to find additional ways to get the word out.”
However, Dean Siscoe does say that a lot of efforts are underway. Soutter and Click said SMU is beginning a new program called Start that will train students to educate their peers about violence and sexual assault.
Siscoe said SMU’s goal is to inform students of the resources that are available to sexual assault victims. Posters with Soutter’s information are posted in the dorms and around campus. Soutter said that it is not until a student is in a moment of crisis that they pay attention to the information around them.
“Our biggest concern is the student who, for whatever reason, doesn’t know that information,” said Soutter.
Gonzalez, who is going to be a senior at SMU next semester, said that the rape still haunts her to this day. After the incident, she was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, by her doctor back home in Florida. This disorder can lead to problems such as depression, a feeling of helplessness, nightmares, and anxiety. Gonzalez said that the longer a woman waits to talk about the incident the harder it gets.
“I think if I had reported it when it happened, I’d be in a completely different place than I am today,” said Gonzalez. “The biggest mistake I ever made was not saying anything.”
