The former senior editor and writer for Ms. coordinated what became the first-ever national survey of campus sexual violence. In the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, Sweet assesses what she learned from the study about rape, activism, and backlash—and what has and hasn’t changed since it was published.
During Ellen Sweet’s eight-year tenure as a senior editor and writer at Ms., she helped the magazine make history as the coordinator of the three-year Ms. study on campus date rape, the first national study of its kind ever commissioned. The results, reported by Sweet in 1985, were met with mockery and dismissal—despite uncovering, for the first time, the epidemic of campus sexual violence, and revealing that most survivors know their attackers.
Sweet went on to spend decades in various nonprofit executive positions—vice president of external affairs at Physicians for Reproductive (Choice and) Health, communications director at the Center for Reproductive Rights, vice president of public affairs at the International Women’s Health Coalition, and communications director at the Vera Institute of Justice. She currently volunteers with Girls Write Now, a New York nonprofit that pairs aspiring high school writers with professional writer-mentors.
As part of the fourth episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Sweet about the intergenerational fight to end gender-based violence, what she learned from the backlash to the 1985 Ms. study, and what needs to change to finally rewrite the story on campus sexual assault.
Sweet is joined in this episode by civil rights attorney and #MeToo champion Debra Katz, legal scholar and VAWA pioneer Victoria Nourse, advocate and political scientist Vanessa Tyson, and The Age of Sex Crime author Jane Caputi.
Together, we traced 50-plus years of feminist writing and advocacy confronting sexual harassment, rape culture and intimate partner violence—and outlined what it will take, in the courts, legislatures and our communities, to finally break the cycle.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: You wrote about this historic, nationwide survey that Ms. did about campus sexual assault in the 1980’s. Can you tell me a little bit about what you recall about that effort, how that took shape?
Ellen Sweet: In 1982, Ms. published an article, and it was the first article identifying something that we call date rape, which, as far as I know, had hardly ever been mentioned or used—and we had an enormous response to it from our readers, which led us to want to do a study of the phenomenon and say more about it.
We applied, during the Reagan administration, to the National Institute of Mental Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. They had an office called the Center for Prevention and Control of Rape, so, we applied. We had an inside person there, a feminist middle-management type, who helped us identify a researcher who had, already, a track record with the institute for doing research, and helped us put through an application for the Ms. Magazine study of campus rape.
It was approved under Reagan, but—I have to tell a funny story—they had to send an official to visit the offices and see what we had set up to do the study. The man came, and Gloria Steinem talked to him, and at one point, he said to her, ‘Well, we may fund your study, but we will not help you publicize it, we won’t fund any publicity for it,’ and Gloria said to him, ‘Well, that’s like saying we’ll help you study the reasons for cancer, but we won’t help you publicize the cure.’
They funded the full study, but never did fund any public publicizing of it. That all came out of our own pockets.
It took three years to do the study because we had to set up a research team. I was coordinating it in-house. Mary Koss, who was a researcher and a university professor, was coordinating the field study and the analysis. We had to get approval from a range of colleges and universities to do it, and it all took a lot of time. Then we had to conduct it. We ended up interviewing more than 7,000 students in 35 schools and universities. It was quite a scientific way of finding them, so that we’d have a representative sample, but also a random sample. We wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, and accurate as possible.
The results that came out of it were that—and this was the big shocker—one in four students who were surveyed had been either raped, victims of rape or attempted rape, and 84 percent of them knew their attackers. It wasn’t stranger rape. And 90 percent didn’t think that their rape was rape at the time, or that it was a crime. They hadn’t realized that it was considered a crime by the law.
Before that, really, the wisdom had been that rape was what happened with a stranger in a dark alley or some kind of home invasion, and people just didn’t believe it could happen between people who knew each other on a date, or an acquaintance, someone they knew.
That was the genesis of it. It was the first time Ms. had ever done a study like this. It was the first national study of its kind. It had never been done before, not only of women who had been raped, but of men as perpetrators of rape. It was the beginning of a whole range of studies that went on after that, that continued to verify the findings.
More students have to be willing to stand up. If you see something, say something… Let people know that they can’t behave that way.
Ellen Sweet
Rios: What was the response to the piece, given that it was groundbreaking in what it was talking about and the numbers were so shocking? What was the response like in the media, by readers, by the public? What was the impact of the data?
Sweet: Well, let me first talk about the backlash, because it was an enormous backlash. The backlash came from where you would expect it. In terms of the media, men’s magazines made fun of it. They mocked it. And then, even the mainstream media couldn’t quite believe it. They just didn’t believe it.
Katie Roiphe wrote an article in the New York Times mocking it and saying that it was, basically, morning-after regrets—you had a bad date, you’re sorry the next morning you ever got involved, and you’re calling it rape, and it’s not true. She was able to use research from this one professor out in California, his name was Neil Gilbert, who called it a “phantom epidemic,” and who insisted that it was not true.
The media picked that up. They loved it because, first of all, with Katie as another woman accusing women of making up stories about their rapes, they thought of it as a catfight. They reported it as a catfight. They loved it, and all kinds of media did that.
Ultimately, Mary Koss got threats. We got threats, because men hated that idea. When Susan Faludi wrote her book Backlash, she pointed out that every time there’s a victory for women or something comes out that shows the patriarchal society in action, you have a backlash—and right now, we’re having it with the manosphere and incels, and in response to the #MeToo movement. It goes on. It goes on.
Rios: I was in college a little more than a decade ago, and we absolutely heard all of the same stuff being published in the school newspaper—this is just regrets, women feel guilty the next day about their bad choices. It’s crazy to see just how uncreative the backlash is. It continues to parrot the same sexist talking points every time.
Sweet: Exactly. On the other hand, in terms of positive response, a lot of professors in colleges all over the country wrote and asked for permission to use my article in sociology classes, health education classes, psych classes, women’s studies classes. It got picked up and used, and student activism really picked up, too. It reinforced and encouraged students to organize. There had been a few groups doing things, but many more formed and did great things, and are still doing great things. It was a spur for action.
Some of the schools, obviously, couldn’t hide anymore, and some of the things they did were a little over the top. They tried to create codes for behavior where the boy would ask at each stage, ‘Is this okay to do? Is that okay?’ Some of it got mocked. They put better lighting in the campuses and had student escorts, but that’s not what date rape was about. It wasn’t about a stranger attacking you on your way home from the library.
Meanwhile, there was Title IX, which had been passed quite a while before, which was to prevent gender discrimination on campus. They started organizing to use Title IX to bring cases. The Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994, which followed the whole Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. People started using those things, students especially.
Then, in 1988, which was about three years after the article appeared, Ms. published I Never Called It Rape with Harper & Row. The subtitle of that book was “The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape,” and it gave all the details, a much longer report than what I’d been able to do in the article. That book got picked up and used. It was translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese.
That one study, one article, did have long-term repercussions.
The wisdom had been that rape was what happened with a stranger in a dark alley, or some kind of home invasion, and people just didn’t believe it could happen between people who knew each other.
Ellen Sweet
Ellen Sweet
Rios: Reading this article 40 years later, rape on campus, obviously, remains a major issue. I was so struck by some of the data being really familiar, because this was an issue I was organizing around when I was on campus—I was one of the people doing education campaigns around consent and all of that on my campus, trying to shift the way we thought about what is and isn’t okay.
Having been part of this and then watched as the next 40 years unfolded, what would you say has or hasn’t changed since 1985?
Sweet: 25 years later, I wrote a piece for the Women’s Media Center, because I was seeing, constantly in the newspapers, headline stories about campus rapes. It just kept happening.
It was like nothing had changed, it seemed to me, and that was 25 years later. Now we’re 40 years later.
I still am so impressed about how young women on campus are speaking out and organizing, and young men, too, so that they’re keeping the issue out there. But if the school is not responsive, then that’s a problem. One of the big problems has been that the schools have not set up adequate adjudicating mechanisms. If a girl reports, or a boy reports, a rape, these kinds of quasi-judicial groups that they’ve set up have not been adequate. In fact, it often double victimizes the woman. (I know we’re supposed to say survivor, but I’m saying victim because I’m trying to separate out victim from perpetrator.)
That’s been a big problem. In fact, what happened is that some of the perpetrators have been banding together and suing the schools for the way they’re handling the cases, and some of the parents of the perpetrators have organized. There was a case at Harvard where about 50 law professors, including some feminist law professors, wrote and complained that there was a lack of due process in the way these cases were being handled. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done in refining that.
Why is it taking so long? I don’t know. It shouldn’t be taking this long. These are smart people, right? The administration is hiring, supposedly, people to handle some of these situations. I don’t know if the training’s inadequate or what, but these are smart people, and it shouldn’t take this long.
One of the reasons is, the schools still feel that they have to sell the school as this place that’s going to give the student this wonderful experience—education, but also socializing, and they don’t want parents to think that there could be a problem, but you need a lot more transparency. Parents have to ask for it. One law professor who takes some of these cases on, said that, ‘If a school told me that there was no problem with rape on the campus, I wouldn’t want my daughter to go there, because I wouldn’t believe them. They were not being transparent.’ That’s part of it.
Now we have the fact that Title IX, which was being used legally as a way to improve the situation, is under the Department of Education—but there is no Department of Education.
Right now is a terrible time, and we’re going to get past it because we’re not going to always have this president. But it’s a terrible time, because even before, in the first Trump administration, Betsy DeVos was making it much harder for victims to bring cases, and now they’re just getting rid of the department entirely. The Office of Civil Rights, under the Department of Education, I don’t know if it even exists anymore at this moment. But that’s, right now, a real challenge, and I don’t know how people are dealing with it because there’s a new shock every day.
I’d really like to see people aware that bodily integrity and women having control of their own bodies is the bottom line. It’s the bottom line. If we can’t have that, the whole culture and society is going to collapse.
Ellen Sweet
Rios: We’ve both alluded a little bit to this idea of culture change, trying to change the conversation about what is and isn’t appropriate, about what is and isn’t rape, especially right now, when policies might not be able to be as effective as we want them to be. What do you think it’s really going to take to push the needle on this issue? What is it that will finally change these numbers?
Sweet: You have to keep pushing the university to be more transparent and more willing to recognize the problem, and parents can do that and students can do that.
I think there has to be a push for better education of students, especially freshman year, preparation for them, because most campus rapes happen freshman year. That’s when students are most vulnerable.
Some people I’ve talked to think that there has to be better control of drinking on campus, because most rapes happen under drinking circumstances, getting the victim drunk or whatever or putting drugs into the drink.
More students have to be willing to stand up. If you see something, say something. Speak up. It’s called bystander interference. Get involved, and just let people know that they can’t behave that way.
I know some people believe that restorative justice is the way to go, that a fairer system for both the victim and the perpetrator, sometimes actually speaking to each other in a setting where there are other people there, but at least coming to try to find a way for the victim to be able to speak out about what happened and for the perpetrator to make some amends, come up with a solution that works for everyone. Some people feel that’s a way you can go. You wouldn’t have to use Title IX. You could just kind of work it all out. I don’t know if it’s possible. I really don’t.
Those are some of the things that need to happen. It’s some of the same things that need to happen that just haven’t happened soon enough or well enough. If the school feels that it can put the problem under the carpet, it will do so.
It’s a bigger issue than just campus rape, of course. When we did the book, we went well beyond the campus to talk to women in other situations. But during COVID, the irony was that our students weren’t going to campus. I don’t know what happened with rape, the rates of rape, but what was happening in the home was there was much more marital abuse and murders. It’s all part of a continuum, and ultimately, I really do believe that until you have parents raising children in new ways to realize that there should be equality between the sexes, you’re not going to have a solution. It has to start that early.
I’m jumping to my next thing, my hopefulness, but here’s what’s happened: My generation, feminist mothers and fathers, produced children, who we were talking about when we did the Ms. studies, and those children have now become feminist mothers and fathers. I’m very hopeful that more and more women and men are starting to realize that a patriarchal, male-dominated use of violence society is not good for anybody.
I really do believe that until you have parents raising children in new ways to realize that there should be equality between the sexes, you’re not going to have a solution.
Ellen Sweet
Rios: We do see that, even if those numbers aren’t shifting as much as we would like them to, the data around the frequency with which this happens, how common it is on every campus, so much has happened with student organizing. Culturally, this statement has been made, that this is part of education equity, that this is not acceptable.
Are there other things that you’ve seen in the last 40 years since this study has come out, that give you hope that we can overcome and shift this culture and stop rape on campus?
Sweet: I am very optimistically inspired by how young women and men are organizing to vote and to take place politically in our society, because they’re the ones who are going to make the changes—and hopefully, they’ll run for office and have power to do that. I’m very, also, inspired by young people’s acceptance of sexual differences among their own cohorts, and again, about feminist mothers and fathers then teaching their children to be better feminist mothers and fathers. I think that’s important.
More people are telling their stories. It’s happened with abortion, people coming out and talking about their story. There are a lot more films and books being written. In other words, the arts have taken on the subject, and that’s really important. There’s a national rape prevention month every April, which is great. All of those things will, ultimately, make a difference, and then, of course, we just need new definitions of what power is, what it means, to be able to be effective. A lot more empathy and sympathy toward each other is needed. I’m feeling it very much right now, that that’s what’s needed.
I see all of this violence against women as part of a continuum. I went from working on issues of rape and violence against women to working on abortion rights. I do see it all as about control, men’s control over women’s bodies, and that’s what has to change. We have to have protection of abortion rights, protection of women in marriage, protection of all aspects of women’s lives where they lose control of their bodies. I just feel like unless people realize that’s a whole continuum, we’re never going to be able to get to a solution.
Finally, what I would like to see, and I’m sure that the Ms. people agree with this, is the ERA finally passed, because that would settle everything. Maybe I’ll see that in my lifetime. I don’t know.
Rios: That’s a perfect segue, too, into this last question. This podcast looks back on the 50 years of Ms., now a little more than 50 years of Ms. If we were to have this conversation 50 years down the line, what do you hope we’d be looking back on? What do you hope changes in the next 50 years?
Sweet: I’ll freeze myself and then come back so I can see what’s happening. I’d like to see that we’re no longer a patriarchal culture. That we’re a culture of equals.
When we did the original Ms. study, we picked campuses because that’s a cohort that exists. It’s easy to look at how it’s happening. But by picking campuses, we ended up having a white, middle-class study. I’d like to see a society where it’s not just white women, but women of color and people of different gender preferences, trans people, that there’s no violence going on against them because they’re a vulnerable population, and that we have more economic equity, more gender equity and more racial equity. That’s what I want to see.
I’d like to see that we have in place anti-gender discrimination laws that are firm and that are enforced.
I’d like to see a campus where people feel free to walk around and go to parties and not feel threatened in any way.
I’d really like to see people aware that bodily integrity and women having control of their own bodies is the bottom line. It’s the bottom line. If we can’t have that, the whole culture and society is going to collapse.
That’s what I want. Not too much. Not too much.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
