#campusrape

Here it is, this is the story everyone wants to talk about but no one wants to hear. The story of a rape victim and the Stanford Swimmer who ruined her life. If you've only scrolled past the articles and news stories at this point, you might be wondering what all the hype is about. After all, this isn't the first college rape story to hit the headlines. What makes this stand out above the rest resides in (at least) two things: the boy was given a jaw-dropping-ly light sentence (6 months + parole to be exact) and the victim (who was found unconscious) wrote an intensely moving letter to her attacker that could and should move even the toughest soul to tears. You can read the letter to yourself on Buzzfeed, or you could listen to CNN's Ashleigh Banfield read it aloud (warning: this letter includes graphic details of the attack and examination afterwards). 

Judge Aaron Persky explained the reason Brock Turner was given such a "pass" was because he believed, "a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him... I think he will not be a severe danger to others." A great deal of this leniency has been attributed to convincing done by the attacker's father who emphasized the consequences these "20 minutes of action" have already had on his son. This decision by Judge Persky and the influence of Brock Turner's father caused a storm of outrage on the internet as men, women, mothers, fathers, and rape victims alike have voiced their displeasure with this light (but legal) sentence. Fathers have written letters to the father of the attacker, Vice President Joe Biden wrote an open letter to the 23-year-old victim... everyone has their piece to say (including a few sarcastic and hilarious videos by YouTuber, Philip DeFranco, posted on his Facebook page).

Many are demanding justice after such a decision and the current pledge to remove Judge Persky from the bench is gaining steam, receiving almost a million signatures. In light of all the disgust aimed towards Brock Turner, Brock Turner's father, Judge Persky, and (for some) the entire justice system, many have flocked to the aid of the anonymous victim. This includes the cast of GIRLS whose viral video gives a powerful message about assault.

Some have been rejoicing in the recent news that this former Stanford swimmer will, in fact, receive some "real world consequences" as he has just been banned for life by USA Swimming. This means that he will not be eligible to compete in any sanctioned events, including the Olympic Trials. Perhaps some justice will be seen after all as the overemphasis on this student's swimming ability has, from the beginning, been repulsively misplaced. 

Instead of letting this story be about Brock Tuner more than it already has, we should turn our eyes to the sobering fact that this 23-year-old victim was not the first, or the last, to be placed in a situation that compromised both their dignity and sense of worth. Now that this one incident has captured the world's attention, we have the opportunity to give voice and recognition to the other victims of rape that have before been silent. 

Every 2 minutes, an American is sexually assaulted while only 6 out of every 1,000 perpetrators end up in prison. Women 18-24 experience an elevated risk of sexual violence, but they often do not report to law enforcement.

According to a 2014 report released by the U.S. government, one in five college students experience sexual assault during their college years. Here's a few more campus trends discovered by Princeton Review and College Navigator. The data sets may be discovered on edsmart.org. 

Party schools experience 600% more on-campus sexual assaults than stone-cold-sober schools. 

The least religious schools experience 3400% more on-campus sexual assaults than the most religious schools.

The most liberal student schools experience 1800% more on-campus sexual assaults than the most conservative schools.

These facts may or may not surprise you. Statistically speaking, the bravery of this 23-year-old women is rare. But, if the victim was not assaulted in public and discovered by two witnesses, would she have reported it in the first place? Would the world ever have the opportunity to hear her letter and speak out against this unjust? Or, would she end up being another generic number found somewhere on the internet, posted somewhere in an article, that a handful of people might read?

No matter the events that lead up to this tragedy-turned-internet-controversy, lives were permanently altered on that day in 2014. And if there is any lingering confusion about sexual consent, maybe you will find this British Tea video helpful. 

Campus Rape is an ongoing problem in today’s society. It is the act of a victim being raped at college by other students through mainly verbal coercion, intoxication, or threat. A recent Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation poll of a random sample of 1,053 women and men who were students at a four-year college, or had been at some point since 2011, found that 25% of young women experienced “unwanted sexual incidents” in college. Whether this rape comes from fraternity parties or even peer pressure, it must be stopped. The biggest factor is that the administration of these universities do not execute the cases out well to ensure a justified dealing with the situation at hand. Some colleges even will ignore the issue by deeming it as a norm within fraternal state. This is absolutely wrong in all ways possible.  As illustrated by the photo above, a college student never signs up for the college experience to get assaulted and traumatized for the rest of their life. As women, we have finally found equal rights in education but this sets us down another step. The majority of campus rape incidents happen to women which endangers us just by stepping into a campus to learn. When we sign up for education, we should be involved in a safe environment to learn and to simply live the education that we are granted. Because of campus sexual assault, this right is being taken away from us and the education we gain cannot be applied to the real world when our worlds have been attacked and traumatized. It is due that these colleges and universities open their eyes and receive these issues in a more progressive way to protect the right of everyone as students to learn in a safe environment where education is a privilege that cannot be taken away.

This is a series of excerpts from MILLENNIAL SEX: I’ve Never Done This Before. In this excerpt, campus sexual violence activist Charlie West shares her personal experience with relationship abuse, stalking, and sexual assault on a panel discussion of The Hunting Ground at fictional Blakeley College.

"My name is Charlie Little Wolf West, and I am a proud member of the Sovereign Cheyenne nation," she began. "I'll get to the campus question, but first, I want to begin by describing where I'm from, so you all have some context of how my perspective fits into all this. I was raised on a small reservation, in a relatively closed community, where everyone either knew each other, or knew someone who did—which in many ways reminds me of Blakeley.”

“My home community, and indeed, many indigenous communities, find ourselves besieged by an epidemic of sexual and domestic violence, alongside epidemics of alcoholism and drug abuse. I would argue the same is true of many college campuses,” There was some nervous laughter and appreciative snapping from the audience, and Charlie continued, “—but for my home nation, we find ourselves at a crisis point. The leaders are not sure how to prosecute these crimes internally. Many people are sexually abused by family members and do not want to betray them. Many people feel that it would tear the community apart to speak openly of these issues, and that we must try to pretend they don't exist, that sexual abuse does not affect nearly the majority of our women and children, and the cycle of violence, shame, and silence that has operated since our lands were colonized and our people were forcibly resettled continues.”

Much of the crowd was shaking their heads sympathetically, and Michael marveled at the fact that this colonization in question had happened less than two hundred years ago on the very land they occupied! It was such recent history, nearly as recent as Japan’s occupation of Taiwan—which no one expected the Taiwanese to forget!—and yet many, especially whites, seemed to think it was long bygone.

Charlie continued, “I felt this way, too, when I lived on the reservation as a child. My father was white, and he did not live with my mother and I. I don’t know what happened between he and my mother, but I know she was afraid that he would return someday. My mother taught me to be very careful around men, to never let myself be alone with them, and to never let them touch me. She warned me of dating, and of letting myself end up with a man who would not treat me like the princess I was. I watched my actions, and lived in fear, and part of me blamed the women that ‘bad things’ happened to, the women who ‘let themselves’ be raped, ‘let themselves’ be abused; and worse, had children with those abusers to start the cycle again.”

Michael shook his head. He didn’t think his parents’ relationship was ‘abusive,’ but he had blamed his mother for putting up with his father in those ways, for letting him get away with his pettiness and meanness, if nothing else.

Charlie continued speaking, “I felt this way, and in many ways I felt better than these women, and indeed, better than my tribe when I got out, when I came to Blakeley. I tell you this because it was at Blakeley, in my promised land, where I finally felt safe and protected, that I found myself in an abusive relationship. My guard was down. I thought I could trust my classmates, and part of me thought nothing bad could happen here, not to me anyway.”

“I began to date my ex my freshman year. He was another Native American student, and we grew close over our shared mission to learn the tools of success and return with them to improve the quality of life on our respective reservations. He was my first boyfriend, and I had nothing to compare it to, so I mistook some of the warning signs as natural parts of an adult relationship.”

“Things did not become violent between my ex and I. He did not beat me, and I didn't think he had raped me until I realized how many times I had merely been expected to have sex with him, and had agreed because I thought that was how a relationship worked. I moved off campus to live with him my sophomore year, and that's when the relationship really began to take a toll on me. He was more and more controlling and critical of me, and I stopped spending as much time with my friends and started to only hang out with our shared friends from the Native American community; friends he liked, friends who didn't criticize him or the way he spoke to me. I still didn't realize there was anything wrong, because I hadn't really seen any healthy adult relationships around me as a child, and all our peers seemed to think it was normal, but my confidence began to plummet.”

Charlie went on, “I found myself orienting everything to making him happy, and trying not to make any problems, until one evening after a meeting I went to dinner with an old friend from outside our circle without telling him. I returned to the apartment we shared, and he locked the door and began to berate me, saying this was why he couldn't trust me, and that he thought I'd been cheating, and that I was stupid, and irresponsible, and didn't deserve him. It went on for hours, and it felt like a nightmare. I was afraid to defend myself because anything I said only made him more angry. I got up to leave, and he blocked the door, saying we weren't finished, and it was only then that I realized I didn't have anywhere to go. I had pushed away my friends, and our shared friends would take his side. It was in that moment that I realized I had lost my own voice.”

Charlie looked down, and her voice cracked slightly as she continued, “I felt like one of the women I had judged my whole life, and I felt so much shame and self-loathing to have found myself in that situation; to be afraid to say anything, afraid to leave, afraid to tell anyone or to tell him no because it would only make it worse. And we lived together! That night he raped me. I didn’t know to call it that at the time; It was like any other night that he had expected sex from me and I had gone along with it to keep him happy, but that time, I knew I was afraid to say no, and I just lay there, and it was like he didn't even notice the difference, or notice there was anything wrong.”

There was a chill, a stillness over the audience.

Charlie said, “The next morning, while he was at class, I called the school crisis line, and they helped me move into temporary housing, and informed me of my options. It was when he realized I was gone that he really lost it. He began to send me messages over text, email, and Facebook that grew more and more threatening, saying we were meant to be together and that something bad would happen to me if I walked away from him, that no one would ever love me as he had. His friends and he would stare at me, in the cafeteria, walking across campus, in class, and then it turned to stalking, waiting outside my new dorm, my classes. I began to feel hopeless, to panic, to have flashbacks to different times I’d felt threatened by him, and I worried he’d follow through on one of his threats. When I went to speak to a counselor, I realized that my symptoms were early signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that even though I didn’t think things had been ‘that bad,’ so much violence had been done to my sense of self, to my ability to make sense of the world and my place in it, that I now was at risk of developing a mental illness! Like I said, I had been moved to a new dorm, and even though I was seeing a therapist and going to a support group, my mental health grew worse. I started missing class and wanting to hide inside all day to avoid his harassment and any potential confrontation, but I was also terrified just waiting inside, because I was afraid he would find out where I was staying and break in. I had nightmares every night, and developed insomnia.”

Michael was sobered to realize that what Charlie was describing must be how it felt to be the recipient of someone’s unwanted, unrequited desire. This was why it was so unethical to inflict your reality over another person’s, to force them to embody the object of your desire.

Charlie looked at her watch briefly, checking how long she’d been speaking. She continued, “Finally, the therapist said to me, ‘Charlie, it seems like things are getting worse for you. What’s going on?’ and I told her about the continued stalking, the harassment. She referred me to the school’s Title IX coordinator, who told me that even though my ex had not physically attacked me or violently raped me, his ongoing actions were preventing my access to education, and that she would support me in filing disciplinary action against him, although it could be a long process. I was torn. I didn’t want to punish him, even then, and I didn’t want to get him kicked out of school, no matter what he’d done. I cared for him, still, and I knew that as a fellow Native student he was working just as I was to improve things not just for himself and his family, but for his community, and I didn’t want to stand in the way! I didn’t think he was a danger to anyone else; I thought that things had just gone too far between us.”

“The coordinator told me that even if I didn’t want to report officially and file charges, I could enter my experience into the campus Callisto database so it would be included in the data about Blakeley’s campus climate, and so that I could get a ping if anyone else had reported an experience of sexual violence with him. I did it, anonymously, just because I wanted to have some documentation of what had happened, and to get it out there in case it happened to anyone else... but as I entered in the information, I got a notification right away. It turned out someone had already reported him! He was a year older than me, and he had raped another woman before I got to campus; another Native woman it turned out!”

“I chose to send her a message, letting her know about my experience, and we met up. We discussed what had happened to us,  and why we each hadn’t formally reported. Just like me, she hadn’t wanted to bar his access to education; we were both unsure whether our experiences would be understood by the campus judicial process, and we both knew that we’d be ostracized, even shunned by much of the Native community if we chose to turn on him, to use the punishing power of the school against one of our own.”

“We each did it for the other, going in to report him, to file charges, and we went through the disciplinary process together. Blakeley flew out my family to support me in the process, and told my professors I was going through a personal crisis and needed some additional support. Meeting the other survivor, feeling like someone believed in me and thought what happened to me was wrong, and realizing I could use the system to advocate for myself all improved my mental health and sense of well-being, although it was only once he was found guilty and expelled that I felt comfortable to be myself again—but there were repercussions, just as I had expected.”

Charlie sighed deeply and looked around the auditorium before continuing, “It was once I started to experience victim blaming myself, from former friends saying that he was just in love with me, that I was weak, that I was a bitch, that I wanted to ruin his life, and that I had deserved what happened to me, that I realized that the problem was not my ex, or even the way he treated me. The problem is the way we talk about relationships, sexual violence and abuse. The problem is our limited scripts, scripts that cause people to respond in a way that is normative, disempowering, and minimizing when they hear about something like this. We hear about someone’s suffering, and we want to make ourselves believe that something like that couldn’t happen to us, because we are smarter, and make better choices, and don’t deserve to experience something like that!”

She went on, “People are trained to respond in this way, because it's how they see other people responding. We are social animals, and we learn through mirroring and oral tradition. But when this violence is occurring, what does it mean to distance ourselves from it, to fit it into a neat narrative and push it away from us? It means that the violence continues to operate unchecked against those this system has deemed it acceptable to abuse, to violate, to rape. As a Native American woman, that is concerning to me, because for much of this country’s history, violence against women like me has been rampant and normalized, and even though we have attempted to tell our stories, to find justice and healing, many people’s ears are closed to our suffering, because they see it as a regrettable but inevitable side effect of ‘the way things are.’”

Charlie continued to speak, impassioned, “My people and I have not acclimated ourselves to ‘the way things are,’ and so I asked myself what I could do to make space for these stories, these truths in all their multiplicities to come forth and find the light of day, and ultimately, to shift the script of how these conversations unfold.”

* * * * * 

This is a series of excerpts from the book MILLENNIAL SEX: I’ve Never Done This Before. In this excerpt, grad student Michael and Professor Miriam Lenard discuss competing interpretations of feminism and the Title IX gender-based access to education strategy.

* * * * * *

Michael said, “I think you’re right; it all comes down to consent and coercion, and who has the power to consent and coerce. It seems to me like all these feminists are advocating for the same thing, really; a system in which consent is possible, which isn’t an exclusionary position, of course. I think if all these positions were able to coexist, to strengthen each other in a multipolar framework that didn’t pit one issue or lens of analysis over another, that they could change the whole culture.”

Miriam chuckled, and said, “Ahh, feminists have been paralyzed by that since the days of suffrage and abolition; sometimes it seems with little progress, for all our dialogue… It’s frustrating to a degree that approaches absurdity, seeing the clash between gender- and race-based analyses play out over the years.”

She paused for a moment, then continued speaking, “What I wish could be clarified is exactly what you pointed out—that these approaches are non-exclusionary, but that it is necessary to frame the dialogue in a way that doesn’t preclude resolution, and regardless of whether your aims are cultural, institutional, or social change; if you make your lens about sexual violence, you must take into account the historical patterns of sexual violence, particularly with regards to race and colonization, and if lens is gender, it cannot prioritize the gender of ‘women’ over trans* and gender nonconforming people! Either you’re talking about rape, or you’re talking about gender; with this ‘Women’s Movement Against Sexual Assault,’ it’s like it’s 1974, like we haven’t had any breakthroughs whatsoever in the past forty years… All this framing of Title IX and institutional access. When you think about all the LGBT kids bullied and pushed out of the school system… Aren’t they protected under Title IX? And if you’re talking rape, how can you ignore or exclude the most vulnerable, the most susceptible, the most targeted?”

* * * * * *