Bad Kopp: Harvard’s Sexual Assault Survey

I’ve never been sexually assaulted. I’ve never been afraid for my personal safety during a sexual encounter. I’ve never been physically forced to do something I didn’t want to do.

On a related note, I have a Johnson.

This doesn’t mean I haven’t had sexual encounters in which I failed to give constant affirmative consent—encounters that would be deemed sexual assault under a yes-means-yes policy. It also doesn’t mean that I haven’t had highly regrettable sexual experiences—ones that weighed heavy on my psyche for months after they happened.

However, when I look at the systemic problem of sexual assault on a macro level, I have a hard time seeing why I, or other men, should take up airspace talking about our experiences being assaulted by women when women are still so much more likely to be assaulted by men.

After all, even when I’ve failed to affirmatively consent in the past (even when I’ve technically been assaulted) I have always been in control of the situation. As a man, I’ve always known that the country’s institutions, courts, and wealth are controlled by people of my gender—that if I report a crime, I will be heard, and if I fight back, I will be able to escape. Women cannot say the same thing.

This is why I was so disappointed when I clicked “submit” on Harvard’s highly-publicized sexual conduct survey without having to answer any questions on whether or not I’ve ever been the perpetrator of sexual violence. How can our school claim to be conducting a comprehensive survey on sexual assault without attempting to determine the presence of assaulters? Isn’t this kind of one-sided questioning the moral equivalent of investigating a murder by asking everyone in a society whether they, too, have been murdered, instead of whether or not they have killed anybody?

If we only allow students at Harvard to play the role of victim, we are failing to take ownership over our environment. We are allowing men to view assault as a passive act—as something that just happens to someone, instead of something that someone (generally, a male) actively does to someone else (generally, a female). We are effectively choosing to say, “Women were raped,” instead of, “Men raped women.”

In doing so, Harvard and Westat, the independent research firm that created the survey, implicitly absolve Harvard’s male students of responsibility. This kind of hands-off approach to targeting assaulters (an approach that depicts Harvard as a place where people are either assaulted or innocent) creates the impression that Harvard students don’t commit sexual assault and that men aren’t disproportionately guilty. In the process, Harvard and Westat establish a destructive false equivalency between the physically, socially, and culturally different experiences of men and women who face assault.

I recall one night in high-school when I took this equivalency to heart and told a girl who made a move on me that I was “too drunk to consent, and [didn’t] want to be raped.” Sure, I may have had a few too many drinks that night, but I was never in danger and I never feared for my personal safety; we also definitely weren't going to have sex. So, telling her that I was too drunk to consent—and then, telling all of my friends the story—perpetuated the idea that all sexual assault (and, in this case, rape) is something that can be avoided with a light-hearted joke, when, in reality, women do not have that luxury.

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of sexual violence is committed against men, and obviously, if we had infinite resources at our disposal, we would work tirelessly to put an end to all sexual violence. To this point, so-called manrape in prisons and schools remains a serious issue with serious consequences. But when 20 to 25 percent of women in higher educational institutions will be victims of completed or attempted sexual assault by the time they graduate, when 9 out of 10 female victims know their offender, and when women have to be careful about leaving their drinks out at parties and leaving parties with people they see as friends, female-on-male rape becomes almost irrelevant.

As a man, I make 100 cents on the dollar, I’m almost always physically in control, and, yes, I have a Johnson.

I am not a victim.

Sam H. Koppelman ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Hollis Hall.