Anti-rape ads give college acceptance letters a disturbing twist

The joy of young students learning that they've been accepted into their dream schools is juxtaposed with a jarring reminder of sexual assault statistics on college campuses in an eerie new set of ads.

Shot to look like home videos, the ads show excited teens breathlessly reading from what at first seems to be a standard acceptance letter. 

"We know that you will make lifelong friends and memories here on campus," reads one.

But a few sentences in, the form-letter rhetoric takes a dark turn. 

"We're sorry that one of these memories will include being raped by someone you thought you could trust," the letter continues.  

The videos were posted online in conjunction with a stark full-page ad featuring one of these letters that ran over the weekend in student paper the Harvard Crimson and another in USA Today with a testimony from a sexual assault survivor.

Ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners partnered with women's rights advocacy group Ultraviolet and production company Prettybird to create the campaign and timed it to coincide with National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. 

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The fact that the prospective students' excitement doesn't falter as they read aloud the harrowing events their college experience has in store for them is meant to call out the indifference with which incidents of sexual assault are often treated on college campuses.

Per the letter's most damning passage: 

"The claims you make against your rapist will be ignored, much like your right to feel safe at school. After all, you can't expect us to expel somebody on the basis of a story that begins with 'I had been drinking.'"

GS&P executive creative director Margaret Johnson and Prettybird co-founder and president Kerstin Emhoff were both previously involved in the filming of The Hunting Ground, a 2015 documentary about how college students face retaliation for speaking out about rape, according to Adweek.

The videos cite an oft-quoted statistic that one in five women are raped during their time in college -- a figure that has shown up in several surveys of college students throughout the past decade.

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