Self-proclaimed hometown hero, Baton Rouge native, former LSU running back and SEC record-breaker Derrius Guice made headlines over the past few weeks, but this time — it wasn’t about football.
The Washington Football Team immediately released Guice from his contract after a criminal complaint was filed alleging he attacked his girlfriend and “strangled her until she was unconscious.”
An investigation from USA Today later found that two former LSU students alleged Guice had raped them in 2016 during his rise to stardom as a college athlete. There are no official records of these allegations despite the students’ claim that they shared them with an athletic administrator, a nurse and two coaches.
So why didn’t the University follow Title IX laws and open an official investigation? Despite the fact that there are now multiple allegations of assault against Guice, many of his football fans still believe in his innocence and think there is “more to the story.” But what about these young women’s stories is so hard to believe?
It begs the question: why are football players above reproach?
Guice is not the first NFL player to be accused of domestic violence, and he will not be the last. According to a study from the Journal of Sports and Social Sciences, “professional football players, and those in prestigious roles as scorers (i.e., running backs, receivers) are over-represented in incidents of violence against women.” The study found that this is due to psychological factors like narcissism and a sense of entitlement.
It’s more than just arrogance; many football players at college and pro levels have reached a level of stardom that allows for material things to come easily to them. They may even expect certain luxuries due to their status.
But women are not material things. We’re people. And no one, not even those among the highest-ranking football players in the country, is entitled to a woman’s body or to committing violence against them.
Women are not material things, and football players are not gods. They’re people. This fact is ignored when assault allegations are brought forth. Real victims are forgotten because instead of fans looking at a football player and thinking of him as a person who potentially committed a serious crime, he is only seen as a valuable asset to a team.
The NFL didn’t start taking claims of domestic abuse seriously until Ray Rice case in 2014. They announced a new, harsher policy for domestic violence in the league. While this is a progressive step, what about the culture that perpetuates this kind of behavior from football players?
It’s bigger than creating policies to punish football players when assault happens: we should actively take steps to prevent sexual and domestic violence. If the University had launched an official investigation into Guice four years ago, maybe there would not be a young woman out there today who was allegedly strangled and abused by him.
In 2016, the exact same year when Guice allegedly raped two fellow students, the University announced all athletes and coaches would have to go through mandatory sexual sensitivity training.
“There are only two other schools doing this at the moment,” said then University President F. King Alexander. “They’re doing it in a reactive mode due to problems they’ve had. We’re implementing this in a proactive mode.”
While other schools were implementing prevention policies due to assaults that have taken place, the University implemented its policy to be ahead of the curve and prevent its campus from being “next.”
If the University was taking sexual assault so seriously in 2016, why were the claims of these women not taken seriously? The answer is simple: as a football player, Derrius Guice was more valuable to the University than the safety of those two young female students.
After news about the Guice allegations came out, many women took to social media to vent about the University’s Title IX failures.
“Too many women file reports, never hear back, or wait months for results (if any!). LSU’s Title IX director needs to go, now,” wrote Twitter user @careschroeder on Aug. 18.
Title IX is a federal civil rights law that protects people from sexual discrimination in education programs. The Department of Education recently announced new changes to Title IX which would give universities the option to require “clear and convincing proof means that the evidence presented must be highly and substantially more probable to be true than not.”
But it seems that the University’s failures when it comes to sexual assault don’t stop at the Title IX office. One student shared her story with me.
“I was raped in the Aster/Alaska parking lot across from WCA,” she explained. “I wasn’t sure about reporting due to his status, an LSU football prospect.”
Though she was able to successfully report her rape with campus police, she described not feeling supported by her professors after the incident. Despite them knowing that she was raped on campus, they did not see it as an extenuating circumstance in regards to her studies.
“I’m just still upset about the situation because I was raped on campus and have faced a lot of issues due to what happened when I shouldn’t have had to go through a lot of it on top of the trauma of what happened.”
Even when a student reports an assault, there is obviously no guarantee their story will be heard. The student I spoke with shed light on the fact that even when a student successfully reports an assault, the campus community is not always receptive.
There should not be a plethora of tweets detailing unpleasant experiences with sexual assault reporting in LSU’s Title IX office. Professors should take sexual violence and the toll it can take on a student’s life seriously. The allegations of rape against Derrius Guice should have been taken seriously from the second they were reported.
About one in five women will become victims of sexual assault during their college years.
All of these failures contribute to the presence of rape culture on the University’s campus. Students, especially young women, deserve so much more.
Olivia James is a 20-year-old Political Science junior from Baton Rouge, LA.
