With Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing Thursday, pressure is building for Kavanaugh’s supporters to convince swing voters to disregard his accusers’ claims as the babble of confused women looking for attention or trying to alter the course of Kavanaugh’s election for political reasons.
Trump has responded in a way characteristic for someone who himself has been accused of sexual assault — by saying that Christine Blasey Ford’s claims sounded uncredible and that Deborah Ramirez was drunk and is thus unsure of her story.
With more and more women coming forward, though, it’s becoming harder for Republicans to pass these accusations off as false memories. A third woman, Julie Swetnick, has said she remembers Kavanaugh engaging in behavior violating women when he was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, as well as saying she saw him standing in line outside of a room where a girl was being gang raped.
The schools Kavanaugh attended while he may have assaulted these women — Georgetown Prep and Yale University — have much in common. They’re both elite, expensive institutions that breed privilege and a culture where students, who may be perpetrators, feel that their status puts them in a position where they don’t have to care about the repercussions of sexual assault. Powerful, wealthy parents can get a student out of almost anything, and at the off chance that a student like Kavanaugh faces legal fees, his parents will be there to cover them.
There are students who go to Yale on scholarships and loans. But a student who goes to Georgetown Prep, whose family is able to spend about $40,000 a year for him to forego a public high school experience and attend an exclusive private school where he is surrounded entirely by students of the same financial status, spends his formative years in a bubble where he learns that his status makes him invincible.
Boston University — another elite private school, albeit not an Ivy League — saw a rise in reports of sexual assault last April, which may be due to an increase in the number of students coming forward, rather than an increase in assault.
The median family income for a BU student is $141,000, and over half of BU students come from the top 20 percent of income earners, as reported by The New York Times. When students grow up at such an extreme financial advantage, as a significant portion of the population at BU clearly has, they learn that hierarchies are a natural, unavoidable part of life.
Sexual assault isn’t about sex — it’s about power. Prep schools and elite universities breed a culture of privilege that encourage power dynamics. Students attending elite schools are told that they’re the best of the best academically. This combined with their financial privilege gives them a sense of power that they assert through assault.
During The Daily Free Press’ FreeP Talk with BU President Robert Brown Monday, Brown used the high population of the university as what sounded like an excuse. He said that with a population of approximately 33,000 students and 10,000 staff, zero instances of harassment and assault is a “really hard number to achieve.”
But why should we expect sexual harassment or assault to occur at all on our campus? Having a zero percent murder rate, for example, isn’t an unrealistic goal. Brown’s response demonstrated a lack of understanding for how deeply rape can affect a student’s life. It can crush a student from the inside out, potentially murdering the trajectory of their life.
After an investigation last year concluded that BU earth and environment professor David Marchant sexually harassed a number of female graduate students, Marchant remains on paid administrative leave. If Brown wants to say the university is doing everything it can to combat harassment and assault, we shouldn’t be able to point to a blatant case in which the university is giving money to someone who called his student a “slut” and a “whore.”
For those who believe that the fact these women are only now coming forward provides some sort of evidence that their claims are facetious or politically motivated, most rapes go unreported. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that a woman was raped in college and is speaking out now that the future of the Supreme Court hangs in balance.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident that Kavanaugh’s supporters were “going to win” with Kavanaugh’s election. Sexual assault isn’t a partisan issue — it’s a moral issue. It’s not a battle to be won or a game to conquer. Republicans on Kavanaugh’s side fail to recognize the devastating, life-altering impact an assault has on someone’s life.
The job of a Supreme Court Justice is one of the most high-profile jobs in the United States. The Justice is the moral arbiter of the definitive law of our country. If Kavanaugh was rebuked for accusations of sexual assault, it would send a powerful message that the behavior of the privileged won’t be excused.
