Opinion University Daily Kansan, April 14, 1983 Page 4 Time to govern The Lawrence City Commission's election Tuesday night of David Longhurst as mayor was a change in direction, according to several commissioners. The commission's 4-0 vote, from which Barkley Clark abstained, was a definite break in a tradition that had been followed until a few years ago. The selection of Longhurst as mayor indicates the confidence other commissioners have in him, despite his newcomer status. It also indicates that other commissioners wanted the change in direction that many Lawrence residents seemed to favor. The new commissioners — Longhurst, Mike Amyx and Ernest Angino — had said that perhaps someone other than the top vote-getter in a previous election should be chosen as mayor. Thus Nancy Shontz, who finished first in the 1981 commissioner election and said last week that she wanted to be mayor, was not nominated Tuesday. She was chosen vice-mayor. But whether or not the new commissioners have the support of the other commissioners, or just the most muscle, one thing is certain — it's time to get to work. Decisions about the proposed downtown project and industrial development are waiting. Other, perhaps more mundane decisions that have been postponed in the past also await commission study. Longhurst and the other candidates sometimes hedged in their answers during the campaign. For the winners, however, such times must now be over. Class offerings in Timetable often too inviting to pass up In the relentless search for topics of interest, it has come to my attention that many of my friends have resigned themselves to taking ridiculously boring classes. I have a friend in Aerospace Engineering who is taking EA 490, "Thermodynamics and the design of armatures for the Space Shuttle." He says it's required for his major. "One acquaintance in the department of Human Development and Family Life is taking HDFL 384, "Thumbsucking and other crazy things your kids might do." It, too, is required. "I've just realized it's impossible to poke fun at the HDFL department. Just look through the books and you understand" HDFL 325, "Children and television." They must be boking! These friends seem trapped in a web of their own making. They are trying to do the HARRY MALLIN impossible: get out of KU in four years. It can't be done unless you drop out, take 20 hours a semester or take only those required courses. What if boring can you get? You're missing so much Take, for example, the fruits of my recent search through the not-yet-released addendum to the Timetable. It's filled with new and wonderful electives in each department. Any resemblance between these classes and actual courses is purely intentional. - HFL 326 — “Children and video games.” A practical approach to an ever-increasing human phenomenon. The course starts with an overview of the most popular video games and continues with lectures by representatives from Atari and other leading game manufacturers. Highlights include a visit to the Video-tank at the children's wing of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. Here, we meet 8-year-old Pac-Man addict Billy, who is “drying out” after scoring 3 million points during an eight-day joy stick ride. Quarters are not provided. *COMS 531 — “Cases in Val-speak deprogramming.” A communications studies course in which the growing problem of the speech patterns of Valley girls is examined. This totally changes, going to be the most hutch course we’ve offered. And, omnigod, like I’m taking it, for sure. *JOUR 396 — “Janet Cooke, Jimmy, the 8-year-old heroin adjective and other American heroes.” An intensive, journalistic study of how to make fiction believable. You will study the art of attributing statements to nonexistent sources, coming up with generic characters and filling in gaps where there are none elsewhere. This course is a prerequisite for an intern at the Washington Post. - HPER 738 — "Sex Education: a practical approach." This is a lab course in which the sexual experience is examined thoroughly. Extracurricular research is encouraged, as this course primarily provides enough time for hands-on training. *CS 347 — "Computer systems' infiltration: where the money is." Learn the true meaning of the "Execute" button. Learn the fundamentals of the new, high-tech, white-collar crime. Final grade depends on how much money you've accumulated by the end of the semester, or how many computer-guided missiles you have denloved. - Women's Studies 766 — "Advantages of the fairer sex." A "How to" course on using your gender to gain the unattainable. Included, are concentrations on how to cry yourself out of a traffic ticket, how to get men to buy your drinks, how to look confused at a gasoline pump in order to get a man to pump gas for you so you don't need to worry about being someone with system to intimidate you. ROTC 747 — "Better dead than red." Learn how to recognize a commie and amabilize him. Learn techniques of finger-pointing and spreading paranoia. Prerequisite: ROTC 737 — "The vaporization of Asia: Fission is your friend." And, finally, I found this gem in a little-known section in the back of the addendum. *LIFE 999 — "The real world: graduation, goodbye." A do-it-yourself class on life after school. Learn how to react when your parents call a one-way bus ticket as a graduation present. That's it. But there's one last thing that's always been on my mind. What happens when you try to sign up for a class that has a prerequisite that you haven't taken? I really wonder about that because there is this super-sounding anatomy course that's being offered at the College of Health Sciences. Wish me luck. Letters Policy The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters. Women fed up with fear of violence Maybe nine. Maybe I was nine years old when first introduced to fear, to violence, to rape. I'm not sure. The memory is hazy — not unlike the discussion it recalls. I was in the back yard of my best girlfriend's house with her and another companion. A friend from school had been molested, according to an overheard mother, and we were spending the better part of the afternoon trying to figure out what in the world "molested" was. It was bad, that much we knew. Bad enough to make us whisper. Bad enough for us not to ask our parents. Bad enough for us to be ignorantly afraid. We weren't as afraid when another friend, this time a little boy, was caught in the alley behind his parents' home by a bum. Bums were our perennial boogymen, and at least this bum did something we could identify in our experience, although he did it in an odd place. He "peed" in the boy's mouth, we were told. Slightening, but not easy. After all, steaming it to bring out the blood. It took us years to figure out what really happened, to put a name to that ice feeling the stories left behind. We had barely made it home and we didn't have anyone with our moms. We weren't ready for rape. But rape and rapists were ready for us and our playmates. And as we grew into women, older but not less vulnerable, we came to know the dread of sexual violence intimately. It became more than a constant companion. It became part of us, the part that wpept and raged and vomited when our friends were beaten by their husbands, brutalized by their dates, attacked by strangers. 1 worked at disarming my personal fear with familiarity. 1 operated on the worn theory that understanding the menace would dispel it and return me to my comfortable innocence. I did a project on rape for a reporting class. I talked to victims, counselors, police officers, researchers. I read books, poetry, statistics. I helped cover the trial of a 16-year-old here in Lawrence who was convicted of six sexual assaults. But the anxiety did not fade. During a court recess, he approached me in the hallway with what felt like a reminder that I could be next. I make bakes, like heaver. "Hey, baby," he began. Later that year, I wrote a story about an eight-year-old girl who died from an infection that was caused by the vaccine. Witness laws wouldn't reduce rape By MAXWELL GLEN AND CODY SHEARER Field Newspaper Syndicate WASHINGTON — America's recent incidents of spectator rape have led some state legislators to a seemingly logical conclusion: There ought to be a law that makes witnesses at least partly culpable for sexual violence. Yet proposals in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island legislatures to fine or imprison those who observe and then fail to report a rape stumble on their simplicity. Simple solutions don't necessarily make for good laws or effective deterents. As with most Americans, the horrible image of cheering rape-watchers at a New Bedford, Mass., tavern is foremost in the minds of Barbara Gray, a Massachusetts state representative, and Gloria Kennedy Fleck, a Rhode Island senator. Gray and Fleck have sponsored bills in their respective legislatures requiring witnesses of a rape to report it within 24 hours or face one year in jail or a fine of up to $1,000 ($500 in Rhode Island). Gray's bill would, in fact, cover all violent crimes. "It just doesn't make any sense to have nothing on the law books to address the type of situation that allegedly took place in New Fleck modeled her proposal after a two-year-old Rhode Island law that requires witnesses to report child abuse to the police. Otherwise, models are few. Some European countries, including France and the Soviet Union, hold that those who fail to assist someone in peril can be imprisoned or fined. In this country, only Vermont does, and according to the state attorney general, it has never even put its law to the test. But the New Bedford incident and others like it would best serve as shock treatment for a nation that too often shuffles its feet on sexual violence. This isn't a pleasing judgment to those of us who see New Bedford as a dangerously, and possibly contagiously, bad example. Only two years ago, a University of California survey disclosed that 35 percent of all men interviewed said they might rape a woman if they were younger than 21. This finding emphasizes the face of such statistics, our society hangs by a thread of social proximity. Bedford," said Fleck, 33, who has served in the Rhode Island legislature for seven years. But the lack of precedent suggests the difficulty of devising ways to round up the witnesses. For one thing, different crimes generally involve different circumstances. Child abuse prosecutions, for example, practically demand evidence of harsh physical and emotional abuse over an extended period of time. Rape is more a crime of infanticide than a murder, because egregious, they place dissimilar demands on a witness's judgment and sense of responsibility to alert the authorities. By contrast, Fleck said, the Rhode Island child abuse statute has led to two convictions since its enactment. She adds that her own conversations with law enforcement officials, as a member of the court, have resulted in a conviction, gave her hope of obtaining more rape convictions and forestalling more New Bedfords. Such practical problems may only add up to a fundamental constitutional dilemma in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island bills. Does an individual have a constitutional responsibility to report a crime, or simply a moral one? If put to the test, too many courts would say the latter. In general, the state's chief judge crowd, the law should defer to those whose obligations are less than clear. Moreover, some witnesses are better observers than others. Witnesses who come to the fore simply out of fear of prosecutions won't necessarily speed the pursuit of justice. Those "who come forward due to some requirement of the law don't always make the best witnesses," the Essex County, Mass. district attorney told the Boston Globe. "We would prefer to have people who at the outset decide to be cooperative." ized. Police told me the man had paid her mother $40. Yet the horror had only begun to hit home. It wasn't until a man broke into my apartment and beat me up that I realized just how little stood between me and the theft of my body, if not my life I had begged. And some monster with a rag tow decided to be satisfied with the $10 in my purse. Eight months later, another man used his knife to convince a relative of mine that money was coming. CAROL BEIER WOLF Guest Columnist reported the rape, the police asked her if she had been wearing a brn when her attacker approached her in a shopping center parking lot. Enough, you say? So do I. But I'm not yet 25, and I'm not naive enough to believe that I've seen the last of these crimes against myself or those close to me. And I'm just one woman in the thousands that inhabit Lawrence, the millions in the United States. Some estimates hold that a woman is raped every minute in this country. In Lawrence alone, numerous incidents of violence against women have been reported since Jan. 1, some of them on the same day. Others, you know has been a victim. At the least, someone you care for is fearful of becoming one. We're tired of being afraid. That's why some women from the University and Lawrence have organized a local chapter of Women Take Back the Night, an organization dedicated to the idea that human beings have a right to life without the agony of ceaseless apprehension. The primary goal of Women Take Back the Night is to increase community awareness of the local problem. The vehicles for that goal are a march and public forum. The march is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. tonight on Jayhawk Boulevard near Wescoe Hall. The forum, held March 29 at the Lawrence Public Library, featured a panel discussion by local experts on such crimes. Women Take Back the Night hopes to mobilize concerned citizens to accomplish more specific aids aim at the current effort to organize a joggers' patrol of high-risk areas on the hill and elsewhere. These aims include encouragement of aid for those in distress, support for survivors of accidents, and lighting throughout the city, stricter penalties for rape-related crimes, organization of an escort service and more comprehensive record keeping on the occurrence of sexual assault. On a different level, Women Take Back the Night wants to demonstrate that sexual assault involves both men and women, and dispel traditional myths about rape; to show that male and female mutual self-respect is a primary long-term rape prevention strategy, and publicize recommended prevention techniques and actions to take after an attack. We want to encourage parents to discuss sexual assault and prevention with their children, and help them develop ways to show their support for the public and private safety of women. Lawrence and the University cannot afford to sit politely quiet while half of their populations are paralyzed slowly by terror. We haven't exactly been cheering as the patrons of Big Dan's bar did in New Bedford, Mass., when a woman was gang raped on the pool table recently. But we haven't been protesting. It's high time. The rapists and would-be rapists of this city are vastly outnumbered by those of us who are disgusted by their actions and designs. But we have allowed them to use our silence — our reluctance to face them — as a protective cloak. Not anymore. Join us on our candlelit march from Wescote to South Park. Otherwise, I don't know how old I'll be before the fear subsids. Maybe ninety. Maybe never. The University Daily KANSAN The University Daily Kansas (USP$ 624-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 First Hall, Lawrence, Kan. USP$ 624-640 daily during the school year. Subscription fees include: hall, holidays, ballet, holidays, and final second class postage paid by Lawrence; Kan. 6044. Subscriptions for each hire are $45 for six months or $9 a year in charge. Second class postage paid through the student activity fee. POSTMASTER: bend address changes to the semester paper paid through the student activity fee. 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