The Price of Rape

It was about 1 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon last October. The captain of the Reasonable Women, an intramural basketball team at Catholic University law school in Washington, D.C., was early when she headed into the gym for practice. The women's locker room looked deserted. It was not. As the woman slipped into her togs, a young black man stepped into view. Frightened, she asked him to leave and made a break for the door. He grabbed her, choked her and raped her. When he heard other voices approaching, he escaped.

The victim, 24, sued the university. She argued that the assault was a direct result of the school's failure to provide proper security at the gym. After a five-day trial, a D.C. jury agreed and awarded the student $20,000 in compensatory damages. "A very bad precedent," Catholic University Counsel Denver Graham calls it. "A university cannot be the insurer of everyone who comes onto the campus." The precedent, however, rests on well-established principles applied more and more across the U.S. Juries are penalizing slack security against rape attacks and are likely to make those they find negligent pay large damages.

Last year, for instance, a Maryland jury awarded $13 million (later cut to $1.9 million in an out-of-court settlement) to the family of a woman who had been raped and beaten to death in a bloody 45-minute battle in her apartment. The rapist-killer, on parole for armed robbery, had been allowed into the building to move furniture in a next-door apartment, even though he was clearly drunk. Worse, a fellow workman noticed his absence when he heard the woman screaming. Instead of rushing to the rescue, he phoned his boss. The jury found the murderer's employers and the landlord liable. The company had not checked out the man's background, while the landlord did not provide adequate screening measures for visitors.

Similarly, in July a Brooklyn jury hit Howard Johnson's Motor Lodges, Inc. with a $2.5 million damage award to Singer Connie Francis, who was raped at knife point in a company motel on Long Island. The six-man panel found that the motel had failed to put the singer in a "safe and secure room."

Armed Camps. What is secure? It is a troubling question for apartment-building owners, motel operators and universities nervous about being hauled into court to face staggering damage judgments. "I can't believe the law says you have to provide a bodyguard for every female student," says Graham. While the law does not demand turning campuses and buildings into armed camps, landlords are being pressed to become more security conscious. Owners, say the courts, have long been liable to a tenant injured by a negligently maintained elevator; they will now have to pay for exposing people to an "unreasonable" risk of criminal attack. "What is reasonable?" asks Attorney George Shadoan, who represented the family of the Maryland victim. "A TV camera system, guards--that's reasonable."

It is also costly. Catholic U.'s annual security budget has jumped nearly 500% since 1970, up to $350,000. Since the rape, the school has beefed up security in the 64 buildings on its 190-acre campus. "I don't want a state-of-siege campus," says University President Clarence Walton, "but the courts are holding universities responsible for an amount of security higher than that demanded in the public domain."

What is next? "Are we headed in the direction where a woman can sue the police department if she is raped, screams and no one comes?" asks Walton. Shadoan thinks the trend in tort law--toward no-fault auto, product liability and medical malpractice insurance--may block that next step. He points to Great Britain, where "if you get raped, you get medical care and a government payment. Damage suits will soon be a relic of the past." Many lawyers are betting it will never happen.

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