They met at a New Year’s Eve party and talked on the phone a few times before their first date. She was a 20-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, he a computer technician eight years older.
They spent the evening of Jan. 17 socializing in a Center City club and went back to his third-floor apartment on Ellsworth Street about 1 a.m. She had drunk about half of a glass of wine when he offered her a small white pill.
“If you take it while you’re drinking, it enhances the effects of the alcohol,” she remembers him saying.
She took it and fell asleep 10 minutes later.
Next thing she remembered was waking up in his bedroom, his body on top of hers. He was having sex with her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t focus, couldn’t keep her eyes open long enough to recall later how the bedroom looked. Finally, he drove her to within a block of her dorm, and she walked home shakily.
There are two notable aspects of this incident. First, the white pill was Ambien, a powerful prescription drug that is used to treat sleep problems and may cause memory loss. Philadelphia prosecutors and police say that they’ve never encountered Ambien used in this way and fear it may become another date-rape drug.
And, unusually, the female student agreed to prosecute the case. The police and district attorney call her one of the few brave ones, willing to move from the gray, cloudy area of self-doubt and blame into the light of accountability. It’s a choice women often choose not to make.
Rape is the most underreported of crimes, especially in the combustible atmosphere of a college campus, where young adults with their first taste of freedom share dorms, bathrooms and who knows what else. Stoked by alcohol, drugs and the ambiguous rules of contemporary social life, it’s not always clear whether rape occurred, and if so, who is to blame.
As a result, experts believe that the sexual victimization of college women is grossly undercounted. Educational institutions are required by federal law to report all crimes on or around campus annually, but those data represent a fraction of the crimes that actually occur.
“There’s always going to be much more than the police know about,” says William T. Bergman, who ran the Philadelphia Police Department’s sex-crimes unit and now is vice president for operations of campus-safety services at Temple University.
This disparity was highlighted in a study released in December by the National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. After a confidential survey of 4,500 women attending two- or four-year colleges and universities with a student population of at least 1,000, the authors projected the rate of sexual victimization.
Their conclusions are startling.
For every 1,000 women students, there may be 35 incidents of rape or attempted rape in a given academic year. “For a campus with 10,000 women,” the authors estimate, “this would mean the number of rapes could exceed 350.”
Apply that formula to some of the region’s largest campuses and a span of doubt wider than the Delaware opens up between projected rapes and those actually reported. Penn reported two rapes in 2000; given the number of female undergraduates — 5,886 — there could have been as many as 206.
Even if the formula is wrong by half, the gap is enormous.
“The kids don’t come forward,” says Pat Brennan, director of special services for Penn’s Division of Public Safety. “They fear the social isolation, especially when the offender comes from the same community. The initial response of most of our victims is to blame themselves.”
Gina Maisto Smith, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the Ambien case, says young adults have a natural aversion to admitting a mistake. “You’re at Penn. Your parents are proud of you. You don’t want to tell because you don’t want people to go around and think anything less of you.”
Especially when, according to the victimization survey, nine out of 10 offenders are known to the victim. The stranger grabbing a student on the street is more the exception than the rule. Most offenders are boyfriends, classmates, friends.
Or first-time dates. The young woman in the Ambien case acknowledges that it would have been much harder for her to pursue prosecution if her assailant had been a Penn student.
It was hard enough as it was. “Originally, I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it,” she recalls while sitting in Brennan’s softly decorated office. “I took a pill. I thought it was my fault.”
Eventually she told a friend, then her resident adviser, then a hospital worker, then the police. She’s remarkably clear-thinking. “People would rather try to forget about it than face all the challenges involved with coming forward,” she says. “But there’s no way you can forget about something like this.”
The case never did go to trial. Last month, the computer technician tearfully pleaded guilty to indecent assault and a drug charge, was given two years’ probation and ordered to undergo drug testing and counseling. Considering how difficult these cases are to prove, the resolution satisfied everyone.
“He will probably never administer Ambien to another woman again,” Smith said. “She walked away with her self-esteem.”
And with a resolute desire to embolden other women to come forward. No surprise that education here is essential.
Every year, Joanne Wszolek, Temple’s campus police service coordinator, holds a safety orientation for incoming freshmen, trying to educate them about responsibility, boundaries, reporting.
“They got real quiet,” she said of one session last week. “There wasn’t one question, one comment. But I noticed the females nodding their heads, making eye contact. I felt they understood where I was coming from.”
The silence may be breaking.