This summer, one of the most thought-provoking opinion pieces in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of The New Yorker highlighted an issue that will be groundbreaking in how literature will be studied in colleges in the US going forward. Since one of the areas where the US still leads the world and probably will for the foreseeable future is excellence in undergraduate and graduate education, the subject raised was not a matter of insignificance. The premise of the article was the study of literature in US colleges coming with a forewarning about content, especially when it included sexual aggression or had violent/racist undertones. The reason behind the radical approach of students being informed in advance was that, in case they had had a personal experience that could be aggravated in terms of exacerbating their trauma through the reading, it might be lessened or that they would be better prepared to face it. Needless to say, the subject spun a lot of discussion about the function of the classroom. Could the right balance be struck between maximising the learning experience versus creating a “safe space” for the learners themselves, the latter never having been a consideration heretofore? While I was pondering it, I could not help wondering about, once again, the clash between intent/idealism and the realisation of its delivery. As in most other cases of anything up for debate these days (racial prejudice, gay rights, women’s rights, drug legalisation, etc), intent is foremost rooted in the notion of fairness for all. The question then is if it can actually take effect in the real world, the one where once any idea in its pervasiveness becomes a part of the human psyche and sinks into a global subconscious, it seems impossible to reverse. Oberlin, my beloved alma mater, came up, unsurprisingly, as one of the campuses that were going to be first where the student-inspired policy would take effect. Here is an excerpt from the article by Rebecca Mead. “Earlier this year, students at UCSB agreed upon a resolution recommending that such warnings be issued in instances where classroom materials might touch upon ‘rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behaviour, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping and graphic descriptions of gore.’ The resolution was brought by a literature student who said that, as a past victim of sexual violence, she had been shocked when a teacher showed a movie in class, which depicted rape, without giving advance notice of the content. The student hoped to spare others the possibility of experiencing a post-traumatic-stress reaction.” The most hard-hitting part of the article for me was how different kinds of women of all ages perceived the nature and intensity of sexual violence and the possibility of its occurrence in their day-to-day lives. “On Twitter, the hashtag #YesAllWomen was embraced as a vehicle for drawing attention to the pervasiveness of sexualised violence against women, through rape, harassment, or other forms of misogyny. ‘Why do I have to alter the way I dress, when you can alter the way you behave?’ one wrote. Another added, ‘Because what men fear most about going to prison is what women fear most about walking down the sidewalk.’ A third offered, ‘Because my little sister is no longer allowed to wear tank tops to school. It’s hot outside. Stop sexualising 11-year-old girls.’” The indirect implication of Mead’s article seems to be that gender (and race-based) violence is on the rise, where the victims are not just the disempowered confined in low-income areas, since more than 70 percent of undergraduates in colleges today belong to the upper middle class. But what is it that is really happening here? Why are 17-18 year olds defining and demanding measures to safeguard themselves from trauma related to assault as if there is no other line of defence except for their own person? I went to college in 1989. Some 25 years later, it is more than disheartening to find that the battle young girls and women face in terms of their basic right of living without fear of being preyed upon remain not the same, but far worse And here we are talking about the first world, not the third, which in any case is entirely caught up in its own furious race to mimic the former in all aspects, void of any discernment. First I investigated the resurgence. Throughout this year, The Times has covered in great depth cases of sexual violence on college campuses where the administration chose to look the other way because the alleged offenders were members of a sports team that was important to the college’s reputation, a significant source of its prestige. The most horrifying case in point was that of a rape at Hobart and William Smith College, where despite eyewitnesses of the rape in a public space, there was a pittance response from the investigating committee. In this day and age of otherwise blazing modernity, one might think that protecting athletes from sexual assault was a practice of times long past. As recently as the orientation week at college this year (September 2014), at the University of Chicago, considered amongst the top-notch schools in the country, sexual assault victims posted names of alleged assaulters (both gay and straight men) of gender-based violence on posters around campus as well as on Tumblr. The anonymous group, calling themselves Concerned Citizens, said they saw it as a case of last resort. The Tumblr page was quickly removed but the fliers remained on campus for a few days. The authors of the lists claimed the university administration was not taking sufficient steps to keep the student body safe. The same happened at Columbia earlier in the year in May when the lists were posted in campus bathrooms. These actions drew mixed responses from the students but more than anything else highlighted that the issue was of growing concern and needed to be addressed. The US department of education is currently investigating 55 colleges and universities for illegally handling sexual violence and harassment complaints. The list includes Amherst, Harvard College, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Princeton, Swarthmore, Chicago and others. All the schools released a statement in support of the investigations and none have been accused as yet of violating a specific law. Even the attitude of the police, who typically find sexual assault cases extremely time consuming and difficult to prove in court, has in some cases that were deeply investigated, proven to be troubling, borderline dismissive, sometimes even bullying from the perspective of the victims. Discouraging them from moving forward and dropping investigations despite physical evidence such as visible marks of assault seemed to be rampant in campuses in different cities. The treatment of the accusers after they reported their case, on campus and off, made them agonisingly admit that silence around the issue might have been preferable to the stigma attached to disclosure within and outside their student body. Studies abound predicting that social and sexual behaviour in the generations that are born fused with technology is nothing like it ever was. In the US, “most 8 to 18-year-olds devote an average of seven and a half hours to media in a typical day, according to a 2009 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and more than half of that content contains sexual images or references.” One of the most significant causes of alarm with long reaching effects is the exposure to pornography and violence at an abnormally early age, as low as 10. The same study indicates that the impact of that for young men and women is equally dire. “Research has long established that teens who watch movies or listen to music that glamorises drinking, drug use or violence tend to engage in those behaviours themselves. A 2012 study shows that movies influence teens’ sexual attitudes and behaviours as well. The study, published in Psychological Science, found that the more teens were exposed to sexual content in movies, the earlier they started having sex and the likelier they were to have casual, unprotected sex.” (To be continued) The writer is a freelance columnist