*The author has requested she remain anonymous, as this is still a sensitive topic for her*
I am an ambitious student. I am a dedicated student leader. I am a friendly face you constantly see around campus. I am also a victim of sexual assault. My sophomore year, I was assaulted by a guy I had been seeing. And how my friends reacted, and how activists on campus have tried to have policies about sexual assault changed, are the reason I didn’t report it to the university. Because to them, I was no longer a person; I was a statistic who could either take up my cross for the cause or who needed to be saved from the horrible crime.
A bit of backstory with the attack. He called me, multiple times, at 2:00 in the morning, asking for me to come over to his place. I had been asleep, and was trying to ignore the calls. But they were relentless, my phone vibrating constantly. I couldn’t turn off my phone for fear of not waking up in time for my class in the morning. I answered the phone, told him no twice, but after he said he’d keep calling, I decided to spare my roommate and myself any more agony, and I met him by one of the gates to walk to his off campus apartment. The entire walk to his place he was rude, belligerent, and very drunk. I, on the other hand, was stone-cold sober. I asked multiple times to be walked back, as I was not comfortable with the situation and it was 2:30ish A.M. He refused, saying I was a big girl and could walk myself back. Instead of going back like I wanted to, we wound up at his place in his room. He said he was sorry if he was being an a****** but he just really wanted to hang out with me that night. We were kissing for a little, but when he wanted to go farther, I told him no, and turned my back to him. My being 5’2” and maybe 130 pounds, and him being about 6’3” and 250 pounds, he used his leg to flip me over. This process repeated a few times. I felt trapped. I was not comfortable walking back to campus at 3:00 in the morning, but I knew I couldn’t stay there without being pestered to do what he wanted to do. So I gave up resisting. Eventually he passed out, and I decided to sleep too, exhaustion overcoming me. I woke up much earlier than he did. I quickly got my things together and left, him still snoring on his pillow.
I walked back to my room, replaying everything in my head. I couldn’t comprehend it. I immediately got into the shower, wanting to wash the entire dirty experience from my body. But, it never washed from my mind. I slipped into a major depression, staying in a lot, becoming somewhat of a recluse. I would turn down offers to go out with friends, because I wanted to limit the possibility of contact [with him] as much as possible. But it was unavoidable, as we had a class together. I dreaded those mornings, purposely bolting out of the room as soon as class was over.
I never reported. I felt that as a student leader, I should know better than to get into a situation like that. I felt like a hypocrite, endorsing the virtues of looking out for one another and what can be done if that happens to a friend. My friends were a microcosm of that. I once tried telling my friend, when, in a hysterical breakdown (those had become more and more frequent after the attack), I finally said the words “he raped me” out loud. That friend never looked at me the same way again. After he talked me down from the panic attack, he said he hoped I would get help for the thing I said. He pushed the situation back onto me, and I felt as if there was no one I could go to about it. Going into junior year I also once told a student leader training group about the attack, and they brushed the fact that I had just told them I was raped to the side. In their eyes, I was just the “1 in 5 women that they would meet in college who was assaulted” (side note, let’s stop with that statistic, it’s been debunked multiple times and is not helpful for the future of the cause). I also felt that the blurred lines that were already there would be fuzzier with the fact that I was the one who was sober and he was drunk, and not the other way around. I thought that I could possibly be the one blamed if I reported, as mutual consent, something that activists champion as a solution to the problem of campus sexual assault, couldn’t be given.
Why do I tell you my story? Because I feel that in this discussion of campus assault, there is a serious hole. People talk about telling men to stop raping instead of talking about women not getting into situations where they may be raped. We can extol all the programs and resources there are on campus, and all the statistics in the world, but that’s the problem. We use statistics and math and numbers to prove we have an epidemic on our hands. We forget that victims, survivors, whatever you label them, are first and foremost, people. We can train all the counselors and administrators, we can scream at the top of our lungs that the system is broken. But, if I am labeled a survivor or a victim, I can’t focus on healing from the trauma. As a “survivor” I feel pressured to take up the cause and champion myself. As a “victim,” I passively had something happen to me, where I need coaxing and coddling. Neither term is good for what people who have been in my situation want to do: heal. Almost two years later, he’s no longer on campus. I dove into other things that have helped me heal, slowly but surely. I gained pieces of my life back, and have become more comfortable with this identity. I’ve told more people my story, and I can see the ideas around campus assault change already. I told a different training group, and these people welcomed the fact, thanking me for my bravery for telling them, and they hoped I knew that people cared about me. Their attitudes towards me didn’t change after I had claimed this identity as a target of sexual assault. Changing sexual assault means not only deconstructing the idea of why these things happen, but also noting how we need to change our stigmas related to sufferers of rape and sexual misconduct.