AT THE BEGINNING of Christmas break, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was reeling from a string of rapes perpetrated, possibly by the same man, in November. The police presence on campus grew as the university expanded its campus escort services, installed additional outdoor emergency phones, and distributed 15,000 hand-held shriek alarms which send out a high-pitched deafening noise in case of attack. And, naturally, there were rallies, including a parade of “rape victims” made up as though they had just been assaulted.
As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones playing the victim. Last month, the fourth woman who reported having been assaulted in November admitted to police that she had fabricated her story. She (the police will not release her name) had told authorities that on the afternoon of November 16 at a public location in the middle of campus, a man had grabbed her from behind, slit her face with a knife, and run off. In a strangely melodramatic touch, this was supposed to have happened while, only a stone’s throw away, 500 students were participating in a rally to combat violence against women. The episode is made all the more disturbing by the fact that the young lady cut her own face.
Hampshire County first assistant district attorney David Angier has decided not to pursue a complaint against her. The relevant statute, he explains, was enacted to punish false accusations and behavior that “willfully disrupts law enforcement.” The woman in question did not name a perpetrator, but her conduct does seem to have expanded an already extensive criminal investigation. According to Barbara Pitoniak, a spokeswoman for UMass Amherst, $ 21,000 was spent on overtime for police and campus security in the 19 days after the first attack.
Angier also cites a second element of Massachusetts law that he says prevents him from filing a charge: the requirement that the confession of a crime (filing a false report, in this case) be “corroborated with independent evidence.” He dismisses without explanation the idea that it might be difficult to locate evidence proving her story was false. In fact, Angier says that he is not even sure that her report was false.
“If you look at the final ends of law enforcement, it is to see that the UMass students are safe, that women are safe from rape,” Angier says, although the woman in this case never reported having been raped. He is particularly concerned about women on college campuses, who “are probably the most removed from someone they can talk to,” although the UMass website lists 13 different “places to go for support and a safe place to talk about what is happening on campus.” At bottom, the prosecutor’s theory seems to be that if anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them.
Angier’s worry about “the chilling effect on women coming forward” is shared by many others on campus. Carol Wallace, director of the Everywoman’s Center at UMass, told the Boston Globe: “One of the myths about sexual assault in particular is that women do make false reports.” Needless to say, prosecuting a woman for making a false report might lend credibility to such myths.
While no one at UMass or in the DA’s office has said so, one reason not to pursue a complaint against this woman might be her psychological well-being; she did, after all, slit her own face with a knife. In fact, that would be the most plausible explanation for why charges weren’t brought, except that her false report is only the most recent in a series of incidents on college campuses around the country in which someone has lied about an attack (physical or verbal), a threat, or an act of vandalism in order to “make a statement.”
Last October, Jennifer Prissel, a senior at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, told police that two men had attacked her in a parking lot, while shouting anti-gay slurs. Since she made her report only two weeks after the murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the campus response was over-whelming. Almost $ 12,000 was raised in reward money for information about the attackers. Nearly two months later, Ms. Prissel admitted that she had made up the whole thing. “Gay students were horrified by Ms. Prissel’s account,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “but thrilled with the public response.” One junior at the school explained, “It was a giant step forward to bringing the community around to respecting gay students.”
While the Chronicle cautioned that this “flurry of fabrications doesn’t necessarily suggest a trend,” the article contained an interesting inventory of such false reports. At Duke University, for instance, a black doll was found hanging from a noose in a tree on campus outside an inn where the Black Student Alliance was meeting. A few days later, after much had been made by the university administration about this “hate crime,” two black students admitted having hung the doll themselves. Still, some at Duke defended the act, claiming it high-lighted the problem of race relations on campus. After a white student at Guilford College in North Carolina falsely claimed to have been assaulted by someone who wrote the words “nigger lover” on her chest, the president of the school spoke glowingly of “the important conversations” that had resulted from the made-up report. “We should carry them forward regardless of the reality of the initiating events,” he remarked.
The lesson is clear. Students can gain attention for their particular political agendas “regardless of the reality” of events on campus. Because these fibbers have a ready supply of supporters searching for any opportunity to galvanize the campus against racism, sexism, homophobia, or what-have-you, they will more likely end up local heroes than subject to prosecution by district attorneys, let alone punishment by college administrations.
The UMass case is, however, more than just another incident in a larger trend. It marks the new lengths to which students are willing to go to make a point. In this case, a student was willing to tamper with an ongoing investigation into actual cases of assault to further highlight the particular issue of violence against women. Worse, she succeeded, because it’s not only college students who are so politicized that they see virtue in such made-up attacks, but college administrators as well. And so long as such attention-grabbing stunts are rewarded rather than punished, there will be no end to them, even as they draw attention away from actual threats to people’s well-being and safety.
Naomi Schaefer is assistant editor of Commentary.
