Two stories in the September 26, 2019 edition of The Paladin caught my attention. The first was about an incident between alumnus Andrej Suttles and a FUPO officer, and subsequent communications about it. The second was about Furman’s sexual violence statistics. BOTH stories need further discussion. However, the first story warranted two articles and 46 column-inches plus 8 column-inches for a photo. The second story used 28 column-inches.
The seeming gist of the statistics article was that, although Furman is not perfect, it is not as bad as it appears concerning other colleges because of the campus housing situation and better reporting. The number of rapes reported in FUPO reports is 7 in 2014, 5 in 2015, 8 in 2016, and 7 in 2018. I could not find the 2017 number.
Assuming all the rape victims are women (in general a good assumption) and all the rapes are reported (not a good assumption when national statistics are considered) that is 7 rapes of about 1600 women students, or 1 for every 230 women. If a further assumption is made that none of the rape victims show up in multiple reports that indicates about 28 women are raped during a woman’s 4 years at Furman. And that is just on-campus.
The Furman community should be outraged that this is happening. Furman students deserve much, much better.
A concerned OLLI @ Furman member,
Gary Aten