A Halloween Rape

It could have happened in any college community. It could happen again. It did happen and a young woman's life has been shattered and a young college student is looking at a long prison sentence and life as a sex offender. But it did not have to happen.

A coed and her roommates returned from a night of Halloween fun and crashed in their off campus house. As they were nodding off, a college acquaintance came into the unlocked house and asked for the girl by name. The student who slept in the living room pointed to the door of one of the bedrooms and fell back to sleep.

Just minutes later she heard noise, a window shattering, and the sobs of her roomie. In this short span, the body and soul of a young college woman was shattered. Thankfully the rape was officially reported and the perpetrator of this awful crime was arrested. That of course is the only good news out of such a horrific crime.

The story is true but we have decided to leave out the name of the city and college where this happened. Because it could happen in any university setting at any moment. Our society has sold our young people a false moral code. College dorms are now occupied by young people of both sexes. These are students who are barely eighteen and nineteen and just out of their homes and high school where most of them lived in their families' apartments and houses and resided in a girl's only or boy's only bedroom.

All the rules have been thrown out in the majority of our state and private colleges. There was a time when each dorm was reserved for one sex only. Now most schools have floors reserved by sex, floors divided in half by sex, or rooms set up one against the other with communal bathrooms.

When did young and healthy adolescents become expertly adept at holding back their sexual urges? No one is calling for a return to chaperoned dates but the intermingling in on and off campus housing has become epidemic. No doubt young men were often allowed in the Halloween girls' house. In almost all cases the guys were probably invited in and were polite and became good friends with the girls. But this open door policy brought a sense of false security to vulnerable female students. It took one person to take advantage and bring ruin to an innocent and raise a sense of fear and a need for security to a community.

The rape suspect will get his day in court and if found guilty will get his due punishment. The girls will remember forever the night when they left their door unlocked. But the real blame falls on the adult administration who have bought into a myth of utopian openness and understanding that flies in the face of reality.