Kentucky and other sports fans shouldn’t crow about the rape and administrative inaction allegations reported today about Duke basketball. We need to take sports out of our reactions because this story isn’t about sports.
Sexual assault on college campuses has in the past been ignored or not investigated fairly. Our universities have been charged by Congress to protect alleged victims and encourage fair reporting.
This affects all of our family members and friends who attend higher education. Students should feel free to attend classes and social functions without the fear of being sexually assaulted or being falsely accused of sexual assault.
When sexual assault allegations are made against a high-profile student, such as a student-athlete, some sports fans use it as the typical moral fodder for banter. “Our team doesn’t have the ‘thugs’ or ‘problem kids’ on our rival team,” you might see on Twitter or hear in the barbershop. However sexual assault allegations don’t ignore athletic programs like our Wildcats: UK Basketball’s Chuck Hayes was investigated but not charged for rape. Former UK Football player Lloyd Tubman was not indicted for rape charges recently.
Let me be clear: It doesn’t matter if charges were dropped or not. Sexual assault allegations and convictions are not part of a scoreboard or a narrative about which team is better. Sexual assault is a horrible, uncivilized event; sexual allegations and convictions tarnish and destroy real lives. (Lloyd Tubman and his accuser will forever be linked to the accusation, regardless of the decision left to be made by UK’s review board. That is terrible for them both.)
It’s bad when we bring sports into rape allegations. What’s worse is when sports fans cross lines of common civility and try to coerce the victim, the accused or the process to investigate the allegations. Florida State fans harassed the alleged victim of Jameis Winston. FSU fans even accosted and threatened the reporter trying to cover the story.
This is horrendous and it set a horrendous precedent. Because of how Winston’s alleged victim was treated by FSU fans, the alleged victim of Duke’s Rasheed Sulaimon did not want to report their sexual assaults:
The fear of backlash from the Duke fan base was a factor in the female students’ decision not to pursue the allegations, sources close to the women said.
“[The Jameis Winston sexual assault case reaction] would be the same from a fan base as large and as passionate as Duke’s,” the anonymous affiliate said, referring to the former Florida State quarterback…
Because the women voicing the allegations did not want to pursue their cases, no official complaints were filed with the Office of Student Conduct.
Overall, I believe that the playful hate between fans of sports teams can be fun and benign. When sexual assault is involved, it’s time to put the rivalry aside and focus on letting a fair system find justice for the victims and the accused. We need to pressure our universities to encourage sexual assault reporting and investigate allegations fairly, irregardless to which groups or teams those students belong to on campus.
(March is Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the state of Kentucky. To learn more, visit www.kasap.org. To learn more about domestic violence programs in Kentucky, please visit kdva.org. If you have been a victim of sexual assault, please contact a crisis center by calling 1-800-656-HOPE.)
