One of the most striking details in many of the rape accusations coming from college students is the alleged brutality of the attacks. Yet when a university is accused of failing to adequately respond to the allegation, one piece of evidence often seems to be missing: The blood evidence that could easily prove an attack occurred.
In multiple cases that received national attention, college women claimed they were brutally sexually assaulted, woke up in pools of blood and were ignored by their schools. It strains credulity to believe that a college or university could dismiss an accusation after being presented bloody sheets or a bloody dress.
But that’s the thing: Such blood evidence usually isn’t presented. And that needs to change.
Take Andrea Pino, for example, who starred in the sexual assault propaganda film “The Hunting Ground.” Pino claims that during her sophomore year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was raped and her head was slammed into a tile wall so hard she ended up with a concussion. She says that there was so much blood it dripped onto her contact lenses during the attack. She says she “woke up in a pool of blood that dripped over onto the cracks of the wooden floor” of her dorm room.
Yet Pino didn’t report this allegedly brutal sexual assault. She says she went to a school administrator to drop a class, suffering from trauma, but only told that administrator she didn’t need the class and was “going through a lot.” A few weeks later, Pino anonymously reported the alleged attack, writing that she had suffered bruises and bleeding and giving a vague description of her alleged attacker: Blue eyes, brown hair and wearing a black shirt with jeans.
A year later, Pino joined other UNC students to sue the university, citing a violation of the federal anti-discrimination law Title IX.
Perhaps the university would have searched for Pino’s alleged rapist had she presented the bloody sheets (and, presumably, bloody clothes) from that night.
In a more recent example, a student suing Virginia Wesleyan College for mishandling her accusation claims she was “brutally raped, sodomized” and forced to perform oral sex on the accused student “until she vomited, for approximately five hours.” She claimed that the bed sheets she was sexually assaulted on were covered in blood, but instead of taking them with her as evidence, she took them off of the accused student’s bed and hid them underneath it. She also said the white shorts she was wearing “were now crimson with her own blood,” yet neither the sheets nor the shorts were presented as evidence during a campus hearing.
Despite the absence of blood evidence, the accused student was still expelled. Now that the accuser is suing the college, and may have provided false testimony at her hearing, the school is starting to question whether the expelled student was actually guilty.
It would have been a slam dunk if she had produced the bloody fabric.
In yet another case, famed mattress carrier Emma Sulkowicz claimed she was suddenly brutally raped during an otherwise consensual sexual encounter. She said she was punched in the face and choked as she fought back. Yet she produced no witnesses — and to this day no one has come forward to corroborate this claim — that acknowledge her injuries in the days following the alleged attack.
And in perhaps the most famous case (which has now been thoroughly debunked), a young woman named “Jackie” claimed she was gang-raped atop a broken glass table during a fraternity initiation. She said her red dress was covered in blood when she left.
Let’s set aside the fact that her claim was made up, because when she reported it to her university that was still unknown. Also remember that some sexual assault activists still hold fast to the idea that “something” happened to Jackie, even if everything she told Rolling Stone was a lie.
When the Columbia Journalism Review dissected what went wrong in the reporting of Jackie’s story, the question of the bloody dress was raised. Jackie had allegedly told the Rolling Stone author responsible for the story that her mother had thrown the dress away.
Each of these cases would have been easy to prove — even with the limited resources available to colleges and universities — had these women produced the allegedly bloody items involved in the attacks.
The women in these cases also waited weeks or months to report their alleged assaults, which brings up another point about the nature of rape: Do women not know that being beaten up by a stranger until they’re covered in blood is rape?
Now, activists might claim that in the fear of the moment women might not be thinking about what evidence they need to gather for a future accusation. That’s understandable, but when the bloody items are clothing, why aren’t they available?
It seems to be an issue of education. We need to teach our college students not only what is and isn’t consent (hint: there is no such thing as provable consent on college campuses) and what resources are available to students alleging sexual assault. We also need to teach them what evidence to save if they are attacked. They apparently need to be taught to keep the bloody clothes that could easily prove an assault occurred.
A case could be made that alleged victims want to throw the clothes away in an effort to forget the attack, which is where the education process would be effective. Give those clothes or bloody sheets and pillowcases to the police (or the university since its often the one adjudicating these felonies) or put them in a box in the back of the closet out of sight. Put them somewhere, but don’t throw them away.
It would be much more difficult for the school and the police to deny an attack occurred when presented with blood evidence.
