Photo by Richard Potts
The University of Wisconsin community has been badly shaken by the news about Alec Cook, who made national headlines for his alleged serial sexual assaults on women.
After twenty years of working in the areas of sexual assault and violence against women and children, Erin Thornley-Parisi, the executive director of the Dane County Rape Crisis Center, was not surprised by the story.
As details continued to emerge about this specific case, I spoke with Thornley-Parisi by phone to discuss the news about Cook and the broader issue of sexual assault on campus.
Q: Have you seen anything like these allegations of stalking and serial, planned assaults before?
Thornley-Parisi: This is actually a fairly common M.O. for people who are sexually assaulting others. To stalk victims and to have a kind of deliberate methodology to get victims into the place that they are most vulnerable to sexual assault, that happens on a really regular basis.
Q: How do you see this situation affecting the campus?
On top of a lot of work that the campus has been doing to recover from its Title IX violations, [university administrators] have been addressing sexual assault. And I think that—I hope and assume—there will be enough support for the victims based on that prevention work. The Rape Crisis Center is a community-based organization, but we serve students. We serve every student who goes for a rape exam. There has also been a little more effort put into public awareness, and I am hoping that there will be less victim-blaming because of this.
Q: This occurred on a college campus, but do you think that this situation has had broader implications for women elsewhere?
Thornley-Parisi: Yes. I'm hoping it will have implications for women and men.
This is layered on top of two other very visible allegations of sexual assault with multiple victims—the Bill Cosby case and the Donald Trump case. Because there has been so much attention—a lot on social media, and students live on social media—I think that they're seeing a trend that when one woman comes forward, other women feel safety in numbers and they will come forward.
Women have been trained to accept all but the most violent and egregious sexual assault and even with that it almost always has to involve another crime, such as strangulation or battery or kidnapping, in order for women to feel that they will be supported coming forward and talking about the sexual assault. And that is conditioning. Women have been conditioned. From birth we are conditioned to feel that sexual assault is inevitable and normal unless we are hurt in another way other than just the rape itself.
Alec Cook is a representative of a rape culture. I know that that term is already losing some impact because people have used it a lot. But it is the culture in which women are raised and that we have to navigate throughout our lives.
On college campuses, women are not afforded the luxury of freedom the way men are. When women on campus are trying to study and trying to spread their wings and achieve adulthood, they are constantly hampered by the threat of sexual violence. It should not be normal for us to have to worry about being sexually assaulted all the time.
We are so quick to judge other countries that have what we think of as antiquated, barbaric laws around women covering themselves up, dictating how women dress, dictating a prohibition on drinking alcohol, perhaps a curfew. These are things that are very common and that women are punished for in other countries because they are violating the law. But in America, we have the same rules, we just don't have them as laws. If a woman dresses the wrong way, she is subject to being sexually assaulted and then accused for having a role in that for the way she dressed. If a man drinks it's a defense that he couldn't stop himself from sexually assaulting, but if a woman drinks she deserves to be sexually assaulted. And if we are out late, if we are out without a man—all of those are things women in our country are punished for. They are just the unwritten rules. That might be hard for people to grasp, but we’d better start grasping it soon.
Ashley Maag is editorial intern with The Progressive.