Jason Derulo should have stuck to riding solo. Bringing an MU student onstage, and dancing suggestively with her, during last week’s Fall Welcome Concert has garnered the singer negative feedback among some students.
“To me, what happened there, from everything I know, (is) what I would consider coerced sexual harassment,” said Brett Dinkins, a student and volunteer for MU’s Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center.
Dinkins said he is not speaking on the RSVP Center’s behalf.
Dinkins said he believes Derulo put the student in a potentially uncomfortable, possibly “damaging” situation by inviting her on stage during his performance, sitting her in a chair, giving her a lap dance and kissing her suggestively in front of a crowd of students.
“It would be very hard for me to say no in her situation,” he said. “You’re on stage in front of (hundreds) of people. No matter what you are or aren’t comfortable with, you don’t have time to react.”
Dinkins saw the performance as a reflection of MU in more ways than one.
Besides disagreeing with the conduct on stage, Dinkins said he was troubled that it happened at an MU-sponsored event and that MU failed to respond.
“No matter what side of the issue in regard to sexual harassment it falls under, it was never appropriate to be at our Fall Welcome concert,” Dinkins said. “I think the vast majority of students do recognize that there was an inappropriate aspect to what happened, no matter what you feel.”
“(People assume) ‘It’s Jason Derulo, and she’s a young girl, so of course it’s OK,’” Dinkins said. “That’s the point of this to me: This is obviously, no matter what happened, a conversation that we need to have. Students assume that it’s OK, no matter whether in the end she was comfortable with that or not.”
Missouri Student Association President Eric Woods apologized in an email statement “for any offense taken by the actions of the artist,” in response to Dinkins’ concerns.
Dinkins’ opinion on what happened at the concert does not represent the feelings of everyone there, RSVP Center Coordinator Danica Wolf said.
The RSVP Center has been a place to educate and protect students on these types of issues for 20 years. The center serves as a relationship and sexual violence education and resource service, focusing on rape, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and stalking.
Nationally, one in six women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number goes up to about one in four for female college students, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have no reason to believe that isn’t true (for MU’s campus),” Wolf said.
Sixty percent of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. That statistic holds true in the Columbia area.
MU Police Capt. Brian Weimer said sexual assaults typically go unreported.
“It’s a difficult process for prosecutors to go forward with,” he said.
Wolf said justice systems often are not friendly to the victim.
“The perpetrator is innocent until proven guilty in the criminal process, and so who has to prove that they’re guilty? The survivor,” she said. “It often becomes a ‘He Said, She Said’ type of situation.”
In many cases, victim-blaming, shifting fault from the perpetrator onto the victim because of her social status, clothing, conduct, etc., will come into play.
If victims are not fulfilling every requirement on the “list,” people will often assume that she could have prevented her attack.
“No one deserves to be assaulted because they’re drunk, or because they’re walking alone at night,” Wolf said. “In reality, the only person who’s going to prevent an assault is the perpetrator.”
Even when attacks are reported, there is only a 50.8 percent change that the accused will be arrested, and only 6 percent of accused rapists ever spend a day in jail, according to RAINN.
“Why would (victims) want to go through a process where they’re going to be re-victimized?” Wolf said. “Often, that’s how a lot of people feel before reporting. That’s why the advocacy role is so important, to just make sure somebody’s there to support them, with just them in mind.”
Wolf said she believes there is a lot of institutional support when it comes to MU’s attitude and conduct toward sexual violence.
“We’re certainly ahead of the curve in a lot of ways, (but) there’s always room for improvement,” she said.