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University of North Carolina Threatens to Expel Rape Victim for Seeking Justice

By: Adalia WoodburyMar. 2nd, 2013more from Adalia Woodbury

Misogyny strikes again.  North Carolina is a place where victims of rape are supposed to lie back, enjoy it and whatever you do don’t report it or talk about it.

Reporting rape at the University of North Carolina (UNC) is “discouraged” especially if it happens “too often.”

Melinda Manning, who is the former Assistant Dean of Students at UNC, filed a complaint  alleging the University Counsel’s office complained that the number of sexual assault cases she compiled for 2010 was “too high.”

Three students and 1 former student joined in the complaint which reveals the sort of conduct that the GOP thrives on.

According to the Daily Tar Heel,   Manning was made a victim of a hostile work environment in the dean of students office and higher administrators were less than receptive toward her effort to change the way the University handles sexual assault cases. In particular, the complaint points to Dean of Students Jonathan Sauls, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp and the Office of University Counsel.

The complaint outlines several indicators that UNC’s priorities entailed protecting rapists and keeping women in their place.

Issues raised in the complaint include:

The University Counsel’s office claimed Manning’s reports of sexual assault cases were “too high” before three cases were dropped without her knowledge.

When Sauls was hired in 2006, ”all language requiring sexual assault training for judicial boards disappeared.”

When Manning applied for the then vacant position, dean of student affairs, Crisp told her that he would ‘never hire her because she had a young child at home’ and what that could mean,”

In other words, the good ole boys don’t want no women shining a bright light on the systematic effort to silence rape victims, especially when that woman should be at home looking after her young child instead of causing trouble.

If you are a college student at UNC and a rape survivor, talking about it to the media can be seen as “disruptive and intimidating behavior”. Not that there is anything disruptive or intimidating about rape or the way UNC treats rape survivors who would rather report the crime, then simply lie back and enjoy being violated, then bake a cake for the rapist.  This applies especially if you are one of the three students who joined Manning to take real action against UNC’s protect the rapist mentality.

Landen Gambill is one member of the group who filed the aforementioned claim.  Ten days later, the graduate student attorney general warned her that she may have violated the School’s Honor code.

According to Jezebel,

“Since Landen knew she hadn’t done anything wrong — she hadn’t even (and still hasn’t) publicly identified her rapist, even though he lives across the street from her on campus — she ignored the warning and continued to tell her story.”

Her story reads like something from the fiction in a “time machine” when good girls didn’t get raped and the ones who did remained silent.

Landen decided to press charges against her rapist in the same Honor Court that considers her talking about being raped “intimidating and disruptive.”  She told the Daily Tar Heel, this so called Honor Court treated her with hostility and blamed her for the rape.

“The woman student said to me, ‘Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would’ve broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn’t?’” she said.

Gambill said the court used her history of clinical depression and her suicide attempt — which she said was a result of her abusive relationship — against her.

“They implied that I was emotionally unstable and couldn’t be telling the truth because I had attempted suicide,” she said.

There is something fundamentally wrong about an “honor court” that blames the victim for being raped than seeks to punish her again for taking other steps to seek something resembling justice.

This is really about silencing survivors by shaming them if they dare to think that justice or civil rights apply to them. Is it surprising when Congress is full of people who think of rape as just another method of conception or assert that there is something called “legitimate rape” vs. presumably some sort of “illegitimate rape?”

The war on women, our dignity and our voices continues and intensifies.  As we saw in Steubenville, while the alleged gang rapists bragged about their “conquest” on twitter and complained about how their character  and morality were questioned.

Under the rape culture that the GOP continues to cultivate the new normal is the old barbarity in which rape victims are shamed into silence. While rape is something we are supposed to just lie back and enjoy, talking about it, even without naming the rapist, is just too intimidating.  In this culture, you’re supposed to bake a cake for your rapist, not report him for a crime.

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University of North Carolina Threatens to Expel Rape Victim for Seeking Justice was written by Adalia Woodbury for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Mar. 2nd, 2013. All Rights Reserved

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