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For 14 Valentines: Sexual Assault:
Nothing has ever happened to me. I grew up in a Catholic school since I was five, and never even heard rumor of anything bad happening in the sacristy. In high school, there was a teacher who was fired for being racist, one more for suspicious reasons, but all rumors pointed to weird things with guys (maybe boys?), and we were an all girls' school. It sort of passed around us. My family can be good and bad, as can all families, but it was never that bad.
As kids do, I assumed, growing up, that everyone was like this. When I heard statistics about rape and sexual assault, I assumed it happened to, I don't know, people in big cities, or people in hick areas, or people who went to parties and didn't watch their drinks.
And then I went to a retreat with my high school class, and found out that a shocking number of them had been sexually abused at some point, almost all by family of one kind or another. These were girls I went to school with every day, girls I had hung out with, talked to, eaten meals with, shared a lot of things. I never would have guessed anything like this could happen to someone with a life so similar to mine. I was wrong.
I got to college, and found more girls who had been abused.
I found out the other day that my college policy towards rape cases is that the accuser must report the case, and then go to a confrontation session with the accused and a mediator (always the same man), and in the end, it is the mediator's decision whether the school will press charges. If the accused doesn't appear to the session, they simply reschedule and wait until he (or she) decides to appear.
I think of my school as safe, but we have an average of 4 rape cases reported per year (in a college smaller than some high schools, that's still relevant). And numbers suggest that means we have multiples of that that go unreported. The other day, we got a security notice that there was a sexual assault just blocks away from school, just around the corner from where my friend grew up. And that's in the "safe direction" off campus.
I wish no one ever had to go through anything like this. I wish that society had imprinted in all of us that if it does happen, we are not scared by what people will think of us after, we are not guilty, we are not passive. I wish we were trained to raise a fuss, to get out of there immediately, raising sirens as we go, to scream and rage and be outraged, be angry.
So let's start now. And if it's happened to you, and you're not ready, that's okay, too. But for those of us like me, who have made it this far unscarred - let's promise not to be quiet.
Nothing has ever happened to me. I grew up in a Catholic school since I was five, and never even heard rumor of anything bad happening in the sacristy. In high school, there was a teacher who was fired for being racist, one more for suspicious reasons, but all rumors pointed to weird things with guys (maybe boys?), and we were an all girls' school. It sort of passed around us. My family can be good and bad, as can all families, but it was never that bad.
As kids do, I assumed, growing up, that everyone was like this. When I heard statistics about rape and sexual assault, I assumed it happened to, I don't know, people in big cities, or people in hick areas, or people who went to parties and didn't watch their drinks.
And then I went to a retreat with my high school class, and found out that a shocking number of them had been sexually abused at some point, almost all by family of one kind or another. These were girls I went to school with every day, girls I had hung out with, talked to, eaten meals with, shared a lot of things. I never would have guessed anything like this could happen to someone with a life so similar to mine. I was wrong.
I got to college, and found more girls who had been abused.
I found out the other day that my college policy towards rape cases is that the accuser must report the case, and then go to a confrontation session with the accused and a mediator (always the same man), and in the end, it is the mediator's decision whether the school will press charges. If the accused doesn't appear to the session, they simply reschedule and wait until he (or she) decides to appear.
I think of my school as safe, but we have an average of 4 rape cases reported per year (in a college smaller than some high schools, that's still relevant). And numbers suggest that means we have multiples of that that go unreported. The other day, we got a security notice that there was a sexual assault just blocks away from school, just around the corner from where my friend grew up. And that's in the "safe direction" off campus.
I wish no one ever had to go through anything like this. I wish that society had imprinted in all of us that if it does happen, we are not scared by what people will think of us after, we are not guilty, we are not passive. I wish we were trained to raise a fuss, to get out of there immediately, raising sirens as we go, to scream and rage and be outraged, be angry.
So let's start now. And if it's happened to you, and you're not ready, that's okay, too. But for those of us like me, who have made it this far unscarred - let's promise not to be quiet.
