Nothing ‘Alleged’ About the Bow Street Assault

To the editors:

I was appalled by today’s front-page article “Gay Student Alleges Assault” (News, May 2). My outrage begins with the title, which gives the impression that the student’s claim to have been assaulted is the news item, not the assault itself. The article continues in this vein: the subtitle states that the senior “says he was victim of assault,” and the first sentence reads: “An openly gay undergraduate was allegedly assaulted as he walked on Bow Street Friday night by a man yelling homophobic epithets, in what the victim is calling a hate crime” (my emphasis). By the first full stop, your reader has already been told four times that the student claims, alleges, etc., that he was a victim, but it has not yet been made clear that he was a victim of an assault. I find this highly offensive and see in it a case of homophobia (or skewed reporting, at the very least) on the part of The Crimson.

Whenever anything happens in Cambridge, from a student performance to a “groping” or a car catching fire, The Crimson reports that it happened, not that somebody claimed it happened. In reporting this assault, which I regard as a most worrying event, The Crimson all of a sudden places strong emphasis on the victim’s subjective perception, not on the event itself. There were six witnesses to the event (according to your article) besides the assaulted student himself—why not just write that he was, in fact, assaulted?

Your article gives the impression that incident was not really an assault, but that this oh-so-sensitive “openly gay” person just thinks it was an assault. I am aware that the term “hate crime” is a legal term, but why not write that the incident is likely to have been a hate crime, or that it yet has to be decided whether it was a hate crime, rather than reducing the hateful nature of the assault to the assaulted student’s singular perception?

As a paper that almost every student reads every morning, The Crimson has a high responsibility in its reporting. This article greatly downplays what occurred and presents the assault victim as an overly sensitive pretender, feeding into possible homophobic or anti-gay sentiments of some of your readers. With the help of The Crimson, the campus can ignore this horrible occurrence, as it only “allegedly” happened.

LUISE TREMEL ’05

May 2, 2005