Silence is Violence. Last week in front of the Women’s Studies Center at Colgate University, students expressed their frustration with the school’s administration’s lack of transparency regarding the discussion of sexual violence on campus. Student outrage erupted following the release of the HEDS data, involving a Sexual Assault Campus Climate Survey, distributed to the Colgate community via the Colgate email chain. Such data accounted for an overview of the survey’s findings. The placement of Colgate’s data against a benchmark of numbers gathered from other small educational institutions suggested the realization of an alarming figure of sexual violence taking place on this campus.
Upon the administration’s release of this data, outraged students assembled and linked arms outside of East Hall chanting, “Silence is Violence” and holding up a sign that read “Stories Not Statistics.” These students gathered on the premise of their continued frustration about the conversation, or lack thereof, regarding sexual climate on Colgate’s campus. Last week’s protest did not erupt as a sudden reaction to the statistics alone; rather, the detached data represented a culmination of the anger and hurt felt by members of the student body, who had previously and steadily felt more harm than good being done by the administration in any attempt to react to sexual violence on campus.
In a letter written to the Colgate community, the organizers of the protest revealed a mission statement expressing their grievances with the administration’s method of addressing sexual violence within its own community. The letter addresses the school’s attempts to confront sexual violence in the past. It reads: “While important, these programs do not adequately support the survivors of sexual violence present on this campus.” The protesters criticize the availability of the HEDS data as a halfhearted, halfway attempt to address the absence of a critical discussion of the sexual climate and of sexual violence on this campus. These Colgate students realize a necessary revision in the way that members of the Colgate community talk about sexual violence. In their mission statement, they conclude that “In linking together, we stand with one another as survivors and supporters, not as survey statistics. We are linked through our humanity, and we approach the issue of sexual violence on Colgate’s campus with an intersectional lens.” Sexual assault cannot be treated as a violence exclusive to gender identities. The demands of these student protesters represent the intersectionality that they preach through the recognition of individual identities outside of the groupings represented in the HEDS data. Their mission statement states: “We are cognizant of the fact that those with marginalized identities, with respect to race, socioeconomic status, marginalized orientations and gender identities, citizenship, and ability experience the highest rates of sexual violence.” Those participating in this protest accuse the administration of the lack of accessibility of conversation on this campus that must be facilitated in recognition of these different identities.
These students do not protest just to protest, as many hurtful and harmful comments surfacing on social media have criticized. Students do not yell through megaphones only to yell through megaphones; they speak to have their stories heard. They speak to finally make known the harm that has been done to them and the harm that has been done to their peers, the harm that the administration has yet to confront head on. These students stand firm in their belief that their stories, and the stories of their classmates, of their teammates, of their roommates, weigh heavier than any number on a page.