Date rape drugs have serious consequences for students

Keith Wright
DM Staff writer

The use of date rape drugs is a serious affair whose ramifications go well beyond expulsion. Carnelia Pettis Fondren, assistant district attorney for Lafayette County, spoke at a recent Brown Bag lecture sponsored by the Isom Center. She pointed out that date rape drugs can be potentially lethal.
"Sometimes these things start off as a gag and then you end up with somebody dead and that's pretty serious. If these drugs are used in the context of a sexual assault, the law carries a penalty of 30 years in jail," Fondren said.
Obviously, the ramifications of date rape drugs are usually felt most severely by the victim of the drug. For example, women have awakened in the morning remembering nothing from the night before, and two weeks later discovering a venereal disease and no known sexual encounter.
Women who suspect that they've been drugged face difficult decisions about whether to press charges. If a rape is being alleged, Fondren encourages victims to get examined by a medical professional as soon as possible. Decisions about whether to prosecute can happen later, but ensuring the integrity of physical evidence requires expediency.
Resources for people who have encountered sexual harassment, suspect date rape or have suffered violence or other intimidation are close by. The University Counseling Center provides help for students on campus.
In addition, Family Crisis Services in Oxford provides 24-hour crisis intervention, hospital escorts and legal advocacy. Still, the emotional stress that victims of violence suffer is intense.
"There's the sense always that somehow or other we did something wrong or this wouldn't have happened to us," said Sheila Skemp, director of the Sarah Isom Center.
"We believe that we are savvy, and that we are decent, and that we know what we are supposed to do so that when it happens, our first instinct, even those of us that know better, is, 'What did I do wrong?' You ask 'Did I somehow bring this upon myself?'
"Then you get some of your friends, women as well as men, who say 'Keep quiet about this, don't rock the boat. What did you do anyway? How did this happen to you?' Even if people don't say it, these thoughts are still often lurking just below the surface. If friends do that to you, what can you expect of strangers?"
More than half of all sexual assaults are committed by people whom the victim knows or is friends with, which adds to the dilemmas for the victim. The intensity of the situation can be overwhelming.
"To get full prosecution for the victim, it requires reporting it and maybe coming face to face with the alleged attacker. We encourage people to press charges against perpetrators of this violence," said Thomas Wallace, acting vice chancellor for Student Life
Still, many victims of violence do not press charges. In fact, according to Fondren, there were 15,000 calls to crisis lines made in Mississippi last year, yet not a single formally reported rape came from Ole Miss.
"I know that one out of every three women are assaulted in their lifetime. That no reports are coming from this university tells me something isn't right," she said.
Georgia Nix, executive director of Family Crisis Services of Northwest Mississippi noted that only 10 percent of victims actually report an occurrence of sexual assault.
"People who do report have a very strong support system, from their families and organizations like ours. I think that our general society still has a lot of taboos that keep women from reporting -- or men from reporting -- sexual assault," Nix said. " We call it sexual assault, but it is not sex. Sex is the weapon. If we just called it assault maybe more people would come forward."
Skemp agrees: "There's this notion that's been around for a couple of hundred of years or more that says that women are responsible for sexual morays and that it is a women's job to make sure that sexual activity does not occur. If it does occur then it is the woman's fault. Most people think of rape as a sexual crime rather than a violent crime, when in fact all of your experts will say that it is much much more about violence than it is about sex."
Experts also point out that using date rape drugs in order to render a person unconscious is often the type of indicator that a person will resort to even more violent acts later in life.