When a student at the University of Connecticut reported her rape to campus police, she wasn’t expecting to hear this.
The officer, who said there wasn’t much he could do about the assault, or Kylie Angell’s attacker, retorted to her pleas with this:
“Women need to stop spreading their legs like peanut butter, or rape is going to keep on happening ’til the cows come home.”
“That was a quote I’ve never forgotten,” Angell said.
And her attacker, who angrily approached her in the cafeteria after he was expelled in July 2010 (he was able to come back later) is still walking the campus.
Angell reported the assault to the university at the beginning of the fall 2010 semester, and by October, a university hearing had found her assailant responsible for possession of drugs, providing alcohol to a minor, sexual misconduct and breaking and entering.
But the situation changed after he appealed and was allowed back on campus two weeks later. The university did not warn Angell that her attacker was coming back, she said, and instead she learned when he approached her in a campus dining hall on his first day back.
“I was really upset — that’s an understatement,” said Angell, who graduated in May. On Monday she joined six current students in filing a complaint against UConn with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Shockingly, administrators told Angell that all would be fine because the two students weren’t in the same classes.
That’s when she went to campus police to see if she had a better shot at getting him off campus. Instead, she was hit with a verbal “peanut butter” assault that implicated all women in their own sexual assaults.
Now, Angell has filed a joint complaint that accused UConn of failing to adjudicate sexual misconduct properly and failing to stop harassment on campus.
And how did the university respond?
“We always must be mindful of the rights of the accused and the accuser while upholding our commitment to protecting the safety of our campus community,” UConn said in a statement issued Monday afternoon. “We are confident at this point that these cases were handled thoroughly, swiftly and appropriately.”
The university said if the student complainants would agree to waive their protections under federal privacy law, the school would discuss in further detail how officials responded in each case.
And as for Angell’s attacker?
“I found out through a support group I was in that [my assailant] raped another woman a year later,” Angell said. “That made me so pissed.”
He still hasn’t been charged.
SOURCE: Huffington Post | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
