Content Warning: This article contains discussion of S.A. that may be distressing to some readers.
How do you begin the opinion piece about sexual assault on a college campus?
Maybe, if you’re like me, you’ve had a decade or so of practice in the area. You know the talking points by heart– you know that assault is especially pervasive among college students. That universities tend to prioritize their donors, not their survivors. Maybe you’re like 27% of my peers: you’re practiced at managing the aftershocks of your own assault as you navigate higher education. Maybe you’ve negotiated the conditions of your continued survival via online forms or clinical administrative meetings. Maybe you’ve spent invaluable time in the company of struggling friends, agonizing with them and wasting your study hours.
And maybe, despite all this macabre preparation, you find yourself struggling to produce cogent statements when the topic comes up at the dinner table. You wouldn’t admit it, but you feel defeated. Everything you say sounds pithy, the words go stale. How will you begin to write the article? How will you begin to write the next one? What about the hundredth? The thousandth?
On Sunday afternoon, 300 protestors gathered outside the Theta Chi fraternity at UMass after allegations surfaced of sexual assault on social media. Their demands for the university were simple– disband the fraternity, investigate the assault. “It’s high time that this frat and that one next door and all of them get either completely banned,” said Shivali Mashar, a Senior psychology major interviewed this week for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. And at one point, police were heard shouting, “don’t lose your education over this!”
So, maybe the piece should begin with a declarative refutation: “don’t make us have to lose our education over this.” Though this wouldn’t quite suffice to explain the feeling of laborious Title IX grievance processes, which are designed to wear down survivors and dissuade them from pursuing justice. It certainly wouldn’t cover that universities require survivors to engage with police and lengthy investigative processes– many of which are conducted shabbily and incorrectly– before even entertaining the notion of suspending fraternities and culpable parties. That as soon as an assault has occurred, a burden of work descends on the student-survivor, and it becomes their responsibility to fight for their right to equitable access to education.
“After beginning peacefully,” stated a police officer present on Sunday, “the protest became destructive when members of the protesting group threw objects at the building, tore down a flag, and attempted to gain entry, through force,” police said in the press release. “A fence on the property was damaged and vandalized.” Maybe the piece should begin, then, with a defense of this type of protest. Maybe it should contend that in the event that human beings have been harmed, property’s sanctity and protection becomes a moot point. Maybe it should hit upon the profound and grim irony of the police officer’s condemnation of the protestors’ “attempt to gain entry through force.” It could be a more heady and academic piece, even, playing upon decades of the feminist traditions of nonviolent disruption and anarchist organization. Would this be convincing? Would it be enough?
If not, we could talk about the fact that, although most studies show that about a third of female college students are assaulted on campus, 89% of colleges and universities report zero official incidents of assault. That UMass refusing to investigate Theta Chi without formal allegations from a survivor– while they investigate the Sunday protest without precedent or allegation– is part of a long tradition of institutional coercion that makes progress impossible without cooperation within a humiliating and non-trauma-informed circuit. That most survivors of assault are terrified of making a report, but don’t– structurally– have another way to seek justice.
Maybe we could abandon the draft, and walk away from the writing desk. How do you begin the opinion piece about sexual assault on the college campus? Well, why do we have to begin it at all? Why do the statistics and aphorisms have to grow trite with constant use? Why do we have to miss class, pile into a bus, and go to protest that which should never have had to happen? What use are the pamphlets, the panelists, the skits, the books recs, the orientations, when the very institution organizing such projects of optical coercion has no interest in siding with survivors when the moment arrives?
These are rhetorical questions– this is the thousandth op-ed you’ve read on the subject, you are tired, and you already know the answer.
[Image: Students protest outside Theta Chi fraternity house. (Photo by by Kira Johnson / UMass Daily Collegian)]
