Charlottesville, Virginia is a a relatively peaceful town.  It has been honored by numerous publications as a great place to live and work. In 1998, Reader’s Digest even named it as one of the top 10 places to raise a family .  But despite our glowing reputation, we’ve been in the news several times in recent years for things besides our golf courses — including the disappearance and murder of Morgan Harrington, the murder of student athlete Yeardley Love, and Liz Seccuro’s much-belated justice in her decades old rape case. The University of Virginia, which seems to be at the heart of most of these incidences, was cited in 2009 as a particularly egregious offender in a report on the lack of honesty and transparency in campus sexual assault cases by the Center for Public Integrity.

But in the past month, the University has sent out several e-mails notifying students of attempted sexual assauls in the area around the school.  In all three instances, a stranger accosted a woman and wrestled her onto the ground and into nearby bushes.  All three women struggled and managed to fight off their assailants. The incidences, separated by several weeks, were not committed by the same perpetrator — two women assaulted on the same night reported that their assailant was a young white male with blonde or brown hair, the third woman described her assailant as Hispanic and in his thirties.

Now, don’t get me wrong — the school was right to notify students of these events.  This represents a real risk.  Both occurred in areas where students live, work, and walk through on a regular basis.  What worries me, though, is the constant reinforcement of the “stranger in the bushes” myth.  In this case, it was very literally true.  But we know that upwards of 70% of rapes are committed by a non-stranger.

If students receive notification only when a stranger assaults someone, but never when a friend, roommate, partner, father, uncle, dentist, acquaintance, or co-worker is the perpetrator, we will only become further entrenched in the delusion that we are only in danger when walking alone at night.

This brings me back to a constant conflict I face — as a survivor of a drug-facilitated stranger rape, I nevertheless firmly believe we need to challenge the prevailing belief that most rapes are committed by strangers or that bars are full of men slipping GHB into women’s drinks.  As I sit in my rape crisis hotline advocacy training, we are frequently reminded that most callers, and indeed most victims of any sexual assault, will have been assaulted by an acquaintance, friend, or relative.  Sometimes I feel that my own experience is being erased, negated, and denied.  I struggle to remind myself that this isn’t about me or my experience, and that there is plenty of attention already paid to that specific type of sexual assault- but that doesn’t change the danger of telling an incomplete story of rape and assault to women everywhere, and specifically on college campuses.

We need to move away from the warnings of “ladies, watch your drinks” and “don’t walk home alone.” (That’s not to say we should stop watching our drinks or taking self defense classes, but these bits of advice should not form the dominant cultural narrative on sexual assault.) We need to begin telling the whole story, and telling people the truth.

The situations advocates, professionals, academics, activists, survivors, and other groups work to raise awareness about and prevent are scary, wrong, and unjustifiable – no matter who commits them.