Speaking out and fighting back
Welcome back to campus! I hope all of you made some unforgettable holiday memories this year and are starting out the new year refreshed. But there are tens of thousands of women and men (perhaps even some on this campus) whose memories of this holiday season are anything but merry. Every two minutes since you finished your finals last semester, someone has been sexually assaulted somewhere in this country, according to U.S. Department of Justice estimates, which adds up more than 25,000 since the end of last semester. Fill up Hughes-Trigg Theater 50 times and you’ll start to get the idea of just how many people this affects in just a few weeks’ time. Most (82 percent in a University of Texas study) never report the attack. They now find themselves in the shame-filled silence that is so common to survivors of sexual abuse and assault. I should know. I was one of them. I spent time on the business end of a speculum in Parkland’s ER at four in the morning undergoing a rape kit exam. It was the week of Thanksgiving, and I was “evidence.” I was “a crime scene.” I was one of far too many who experience assault and one of the far too few who report it. Needless to say, it wasn’t my best holiday.
Rape is an attack on an individual, an act of personal violence for which the assailant—and only the assailant—is responsible. It is an earth-shattering breach of trust and a violation of physical, emotional, social, and spiritual boundaries. But the very fact that rape is allowed to exist in our culture is an attack on women in general. It is a form of societal violence for which we all must be held accountable. We contribute to the problem when we question a woman’s story based on what she was wearing, who she was with, or how much she had to drink beforehand. Whether or not we consider a person’s behavior socially appropriate, violating some notion of “ladylike” conduct is not a rapeable offense! Yet in many sexual assault cases (both in court and in the public eye), it is the victim that is on trial, not the assailant. No wonder so few ever report.
Case in point: A number of months ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a self-defense instructor in my neighborhood, and she brought up an incident that occurred a while back in which a woman was sexually assaulted in the parking lot of a shopping center rather late in the evening. My friend, who teaches women how to protect themselves from an attacker, made the comment that the victim shouldn’t have been out grocery shopping at that time of day in that particular neighborhood, that she should have known better, insinuating through her words and by her tone of voice that the victim was at least partly culpable for the assault against her. I wish now that I would have thought to reply, “She might not have been raped if she hadn’t been there, but she certainly wouldn’t have been if her assailant hadn’t been there!” Instead, I remained silent, and through my silence I perpetuated the myth that a victim can be responsible for someone else’s crime against her.
Likewise, what hurt me in the wake of my own assault was not the response of the police. Contrary to previous DC reports, there is no grand conspiracy on the part of SMU PD with regard to rape reporting. If anything, Chief Snellgrove and Captain Jones went above and beyond the call of duty. Their number one priority is the safety of everyone on this campus. They are constrained by policies and bureaucratic red tape as much as anyone, but they are 100 percent committed to what they do.
What upset me was the reaction of my peers—not those that know me personally, but students just sitting in the Commons making flippant remarks, insinuating that I was not really assaulted or that I enjoyed it. This is the second assault, the social violation which can be as painful as the rape itself. Rape is a powerful violation of the body and the soul, a complete disrespect for someone’s humanity not unlike what I see in some of my peers.
I’m sure those who were laughing about my situation had no idea that their words would reach my ears. Words wield far more power to injure than we sometimes realize, and respect is paid far less frequently than it is due. The attitudes exemplified in such callous joking desensitize us to the reality that far too many people on this campus have to live with on a daily basis. The flip side of this is that language has tremendous power to spread salve on wounds inflicted by careless tongues, and to plant seeds of change that could impact our society in a positive way, little by little. Our small but significant acts of nonviolent protest can ripple outward into the violent world from which we cannot escape but can and must change.
If you want to help make this campus a safer place for students, start by examining your own prejudices and attitudes on these issues. Refuse to give in to apathy and silence that allow our culture to retain its shameful position as a nation with one of the highest reported rates of sexual assault in the world. What are you doing to perpetuate the problem, and what are you doing to fix it?
