Chloe Allred, Winter, Plucked (oil on canvas)
Tattoos
ANNIE CLARK
Much to my parents’ chagrin, I got a tattoo; my first was in the summer of 2009, when I was doing an internship in Washington, D.C. I got a small female symbol, the one that comes from Greek mythology—it’s said to be Venus’s comb and mirror. I didn’t tell anyone what my tattoo meant to me until much later, and often I had it covered up with a bracelet or a watch. I had contemplated getting “survivor” or something else in text, but while I wanted something purposeful, I didn’t want something obviously connected to sexual violence. With this tattoo, I could always say it symbolized my dedication to women’s issues and equal rights instead of disclosing what it meant to me. My tiny tattoo was a reminder that I had survived something and that, though I wasn’t over it, I was getting through it.
I got my second tattoo in January 2013, the day five of us filed two federal complaints with the U.S. Department of Education against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This time, my ink wasn’t about marking my survival; it was the recognition of learning my rights and fighting back. I wanted to hold the university I loved accountable for violating Title IX. Although my assault had occurred off campus, the treatment I received when I disclosed that crime for the first time to a campus employee meant that something had to change for UNC students. The quarter-sized “IX” on the inside of my right ankle represents taking a bold first step.
Lilly Jay adapted this piece from a speech she gave on September 19, 2014, introducing Vice President Joe Biden at the White House launch of the It’s On Us initiative to raise awareness of campus sexual assault. It’s On Us specifically encourages that bystanders intervene to prevent sexual assault.
Reclaiming College
LILLY JAY
Getting into college is difficult. Getting your college back, reclaiming it as your own after a sexual assault, is nearly impossible. I was raped a few weeks into my freshman year. I became a student by day and prey by night. For a year, I pantomimed learning, and I watched educational opportunities slip away.
The day I found out that the student who had assaulted me had raped someone else, I filed a disciplinary complaint against him. I joined survivors across the country in announcing our truth. My newfound activism seemed like a promising antidote to the loneliness of surviving assault. But the truth is, it didn’t help me reclaim college.
Whether you’re thinking about it because you’re scared of the boy down the hall or because you’re planning a meeting with the college president, recalling rape always hurts.
That’s the terrible irony of sexual assault activism: using your experience to protect others from rape is so empowering, but it also tethers you to your pain. In order to be heard, I had to talk about the night in which violence silenced me.
When nonsurvivors step up and say, “I don’t need to be hurt to care about assault,” they give survivors permission to move our hearts from the edge of our sleeves back to where they belong. Hearing my friends, family, and professors say, “You don’t need to stay hurt to convince us to care” freed me. That’s when I got back my college experience.
Every moment or statement of support makes it easier for survivors to finally mourn for our younger selves and find reasons to love our communities again. Allies do more than prevent future assaults; they help carry the heavy truth that colleges are not safe, but they can and should be. Only nonsurvivors can ensure that when we look back, we can say that compassion, not trauma, changed the world.
* * *
School After
A Chorus
I dropped one of my classes because I had started having so many nightmares and panic attacks.
I didn’t go to tutoring. I didn’t leave my dorm. If I walked down the hall, people would look at me and stare. I could tell they knew.
I’d had Bs and I started getting Fs.
I dropped out.
For the most part I was always able to sleep, but I wouldn’t go to bed until almost morning. Then I would sleep during the day.
I got behind on my thesis, got really depressed.
I kept running into my rapist on campus, so I left early.
I came back to school and kept trying to be normal and live a normal life, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go to parties anymore.
I fell out of love with the school.
I went into group therapy at school. Most of us had been assaulted by other students. We were men, women, trans people.
So for now I’m taking summer classes. I’m going to Bryn Mawr College, outside of Philadelphia, an all-women’s school. I’m excited about that.
This is my university just as much as it is his. I’m gonna go back.
I threw myself into my work and that numbed me out. I did a bunch of Adderall and I did a bunch of work. I graduated.
My women’s studies class was the pivot point in my life. I was able to find the answers I had been looking for.
School was a sanctuary.
It’s only because I love my university and feel like it’s my home that I can stay and try to make a difference.
I will graduate with him. I know a lot of people transfer. But I felt that my leaving would be because of him, and that any new environment would be tainted because of that outlook.
There are no awards at graduation that say, “This person got out of bed and went to class every day, and followed up with therapy, and took their medication.”
I just feel very betrayed by my university, and so angry. Not just for myself but for the other girls who go through this.
I’m going to graduate. I want that degree. I want to say, “Screw them and all their attempts to make me feel low.”
I graduated.
I ended up with two degrees—and my life is so different.
I don’t know that I will finish the Ph.D. program, and it doesn’t matter as much. They tried to give me allowances but the work requires you to be 100 percent focused, and I’ve stopped feeling that. And I don’t know if my brain is 100 percent there.
After two years, I talked to one of the detectives. She said she was there the day I graduated, that she had to hold herself back from running up to me and hugging me. She told me, “I was so proud of you for sticking to your guns and graduating.”
* * *
Dear Harvard: This Fight Is Not Over
ARIANE LITALIEN
Dear Harvard,
I am writing this piece as I sit in my own dining room, hundreds of miles away from the guy who pressured me into sexual activity in his bedroom one night in 2013. I do not know how to express the bittersweet taste of this moment in words. The joy of still being alive, and the anger I still have toward you for failing survivors of sexual violence almost two years after my piece, “Dear Harvard: You Win,” appeared in the Crimson and went viral. The sense of peace that I’ve come to reach about one night in February 2013, and the overwhelming feeling of bereavement that I have to overcome every day because of the way you handled my assault. The support I have gotten from so many friends and strangers, and the reality that, after everything that was said, done, written, and rewritten, so many survivors at your school still do not feel heard.
I am writing this piece on a Friday afternoon, after finishing my eleventh week as a first-year medical student at McGill University. To most strangers, I probably look like any other female student in her twenties, busing around my textbooks on the subway, cramming in a coffee shop before an exam, going to dinner parties with old friends. I manage to study on most days, I only wake up once a night, and I regularly work up enough of an appetite to squeeze three meals in a day. I am able to laugh sincerely, to take care of myself, and to appreciate little moments that make life beautiful. These are huge victories.
But in spite of all this, my anxiety and the ghost of depression still haunt me. I’ve tried doing yoga, practicing mindfulness, adopting a cat, painting, picking up photography again. I’ve tried writing about the
good things, writing about the bad things, not writing at all. But none of these has been able to erase the certainty that something terrible is about to happen to me, that I will imminently be betrayed by someone I trust, that I will fall again into a pattern of self-harm and suicidal ideation until I finally gather enough courage to act on my thoughts. I still can’t drink coffee or alcohol without risking a panic attack. I have had to take sick days at work and at school to deal with severe bouts of anxiety. I am on four types of medication, and probably will be for the rest of my life. For me, this fight isn’t over.
After seeing so many administrators repeatedly turn their backs on me following my assault, my piece in the Crimson became, in a way, the only means I had left to ensure my voice would be heard by someone, somewhere. The day my op-ed was published, after several months of work with Crimson lawyers to get legal clearance, I stayed up until five a.m. to watch my words go live on the Crimson website. It was a cold and cloudy Monday in early spring, over a year after my assault, and I had an organic chemistry midterm later that week. But as my fellow classmates worked their way through aldehydes and ketones in the library, my eyes were glued to my Twitter feed, a few feet away from their textbooks. I remember the constant tingling at the bottom of my stomach and the restlessness of my eyes as I scrolled through dozens and dozens of supportive tweets, from strangers in France and from Mia Farrow; from classmates who did not know I was the author and from U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. After all those days spent in bed and those nights crying myself to sleep, after all those conversations with Harvard administrators that ended with the same refusals to acknowledge my pain, and after almost being hospitalized for suicidal behavior, people were finally saying that I had been right all this time, and that those administrators were wrong. People were saying that I was right. It was, and still remains, the best day of my life.
There were, of course, Reddit users, other online commenters, and conservative writers to say that that night in February was just “sex that I regret,” to claim that I never said no, never screamed, and never ran away, and even to bring forth some twisted conspiracy theory about how I framed my assailant. The fear of such comments is what kept me from coming forward with my story—at Harvard initially, and in the Crimson for many additional months after. To physically survive a sexual assault means being constantly flooded with raw pain, anger, self-hatred, shame, sadness, and distress, and these feelings are often the only things you know to be real before you begin to process what happened to you. In this context, to be told that your feelings are not justified, that your assault was just a misunderstanding, and that you are overreacting has the very real potential to completely destroy you.
* * *
People were saying I was right. It was, and still remains, the best day of my life.
* * *
And so I didn’t publish “Dear Harvard: You Win” for a long time because, in addition to being scared that my institution would retaliate against me, I was scared that readers would tell me that I had not been sexually assaulted, just as Harvard had done before. I did not think I could take any other attempts to suppress my voice. Eventually, I realized that the judgments, the comments, the dismissals—none of them mattered. I was not going to give up one of the few things I had left: the power to judge for myself what had happened to me. To this day, the certainty that my distress was real and that my assailant went beyond the boundaries of my consent is what shields me from any misguided comments on my assault.
And eventually, in spite of my believing otherwise, things got better. I moved to a new house at Harvard, got to know the academic and career advisers there, attended a few formal events, and met my new resident dean, who proved to be the polar opposite of the administrators I had encountered before. He was kind and understanding and did not shy away from echoing my thoughts whenever Harvard seemed to be failing me. One of my professors, learning about my fight with her institution, and seeing that I was about to fail her class, gave me a clean slate midsemester. I successfully filed for a restraining order against my assailant, and became one of the complainants in a Title IX complaint against Harvard College. I moved to New York City, got a job, and never heard from Harvard officials again. After submitting a long letter that explained the extenuating circumstances behind poor grades in my last three premed courses, I got into medical school.
Some people may take my medical school admission as the ultimate victory against you, Harvard, but I will never see it that way. You took away pieces of me that I will never get back: my tendency to trust and see the good in people; my optimism; and, more important, my ability to function normally in society. Yet you’ve also given me resilience, the strength to speak up for what I believe in, and the pragmatic understanding that is necessary to change the system—all of which will make me a great advocate for survivors, and a great doctor. As a medical student, I want to raise awareness about the ways health care providers can avoid retraumatization when they encounter survivors of sexual violence. And I know that, as a doctor, I can do for survivors what Harvard didn’t do for me: listen to them, and, even more important, believe them.
* * *
I know that, as a doctor, I can do for survivors what Harvard didn’t do for me: listen to them, and, even more important, believe them.
* * *
And yet, Harvard, I am also writing this piece a year after your Title IX coordinator refused to incorporate the concept of affirmative consent into the school’s new sexual assault policy. I am writing this piece knowing all too well that a student found guilty of sexual assault by your disciplinary board was recently allowed back on campus to finish his degree. I am writing this piece two days after nineteen professors at your law school—an institution found in violation of Title IX by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—attempted to silence a former student and survivor through intimidation in an open letter.1 I am writing this piece after too many of my own friends have come forward about their sexual assaults on your campus, but whose voices will never be heard because the task force you created to address sexual violence still does not allow them to participate in—or even sit in on—its meetings. And for them, Harvard—for us—I want you to know that this fight isn’t over. But someday, I know, we will win.
—Fall 2015
An Important Event
A STATEMENT GIVEN ON FEBRUARY 26, 2014, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–BERKELEY
SOFIE KARASEK
Good morning, and thank you for your attendance at this important event. My name is Sofie Karasek and I am a third-year student here at the University of California–Berkeley. We are here today to announce the filing of two federal complaints against Berkeley for failing to prevent, investigate, or discipline assailants in cases of sexual violence and harassment.
This past May, eight students and I filed a federal Clery Act complaint against U.C.–Berkeley. Over nine months have passed, and we still have not been told whether or not the federal government is planning to investigate our complaint. After multiple failed attempts to reach the Department of Education about our case, we are now filing yet another Clery Act complaint against Berkeley, in addition to a Title IX complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. Our complaint has grown from nine to thirty-one cases. It is unacceptable that as we wait for the federal government to respond to our complaint, more students are being sexually assaulted, and continue to have their cases dismissed, mishandled, and ignored if they choose to report them. Several of our complainants had problems with the administrative process even after the first federal complaint, and even after the State of California began auditing our school.
While the intentions of the Department of Education and U.C.–Berkeley may be different, the impact of their deliberate indifference to sexual violence is the same. Neither the Department of Education nor U.C.–Berkeley has made the efforts necessary to address the pervasive culture of sexual violence on our campus. This is not only disappointing; it is also dangerous for
the students who attend college here, and is representative of a larger problem: the federal government is not adequately enforcing its own laws.
Now I’d like to ask the staff of the Clery Compliance Division and the Office for Civil Rights to consider a similar question to the one that I recently posed to the U.C. Board of Regents: How do you sleep at night, knowing that students are being assaulted because of your inaction? How would you feel if one of your children or someone you know went through this utterly useless, demeaning process?
Nearly two years ago, I went to report my assault through the campus process. The assault happened on an off-campus trip in February 2012; he was a leader in the student organization, and I was a freshman who had never been involved in the group before. After it happened to me, I quickly learned that I wasn’t the first person he had assaulted. Another leader in the organization approached me about it, and she met with representatives from the Gender Equity Resource Center to seek guidance for how to address his presence in the organization.
* * *
How do you sleep at night, knowing that students are being assaulted because of your inaction?
* * *
To my surprise, someone at the the Gender Equity Resource Center, which is often a positive and inclusive space for many students, advised her against removing him from the organization. The representative said that our organization should “keep him close in case he does it again” so that he would “have a community of friends to support him in processing it.” Why should his healing process take precedence over the possibility that he could assault me again, or assault another person?
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 22