Imagine you are a woman living in a house with four other people, two blocks away from campus. One night, you are awakened from a deep sleep by a strange man standing in your bedroom doorway with his pants around his ankles, asking if you want a piece of him. You yell for him to get out of your house.

Meanwhile, your roommates are beginning to wake up. The man in your doorway has decided to turn your bedroom light on, and you have jumped out of bed. A struggle ensues. You manage to shove him out of your room and lock your door. Suddenly, a loud crash and the center panel of your bedroom door is on the floor, and the man who tried to attack you is staring in.

Three years ago, that woman was me. Although I had locked the doors before going to bed, one of my roommates had come home hours later and failed to lock the door behind him. It turned out that I was able to fight off my assailant that night. I was lucky.

I was lucky because the officer, who responded to my call, never questioned why the door was unlocked or whether I had been drinking the night before. He also never questioned my motives in waiting to report the assault the day after the incident happened.

With that in mind, I turn your attention to the column, "One drunken weekend in E.L. brings assault, rape, hospital visits" (SN 9/29), submitted to The State News by a captain of the East Lansing Police Department. Had I read that article before I was assaulted three years ago, I might never have reported the crime. After all, according to the column, my front door was left unlocked that night, thereby inviting my assailant into my home.

According to the Bureau of Justice in the U.S. Department of Justice, comments such as, "Why were you there?," "How did you get yourself in that situation?" and "You should have known better" takes blame away from the offender and places it on the victim.

The same source offers the statistic that 76 percent of the victims of sexual assault between the years of 1992 and 2000 never reported the crime. This information should hardly be surprising when we take into account that, apparently, the police are comfortable taking a public stance of blaming the victim for the crime perpetrated on them.

I find it extremely disconcerting that one of the very people that we, as students, are supposed to call for help has minimized sexual assault into a crime of naivety and irresponsibility on the part of its victims. It is also a great disappointment that the captain has done so by exploiting the assaults of four women courageous enough to report the crimes committed the night of the Notre Dame game.

Here's an idea: If you are captain of a police force serving a community of college students, try not to promote sexual assault on campus by letting women know that if it happens to them, it was probably their own fault.

Kasey Lance
social work graduate student