I passed signs boasting “98% of Our University is Nonviolent!” while on my way to a sexual assault survivors group to meet with twenty other women who were raped on campus in the last year.Hers: four men behind the science building, her face grating the asphalt, turns taken from behind. Two officers found her, they took no notes, they asked her to calm down, she was hysterical.Hers: a rapist with a name engraved on some campus building, a rape kit that showed her lacerations, a rape kit that showed his semen, a rape kit that was thrown out prematurely, a rapist that walked.Hers: a professor, but he was tenured.Hers: a long walk to the police, freshly raped, dress wadded between her legs, bloodied from all that tearing. The officer asked if she was sure it wasn’t her period. “Are you sure?” he pressed. “Are you sure? Are you sure?”Hers: a drug in a drink at a frat party, her body left between the cars in a gravel parking lot, a mandatory alcohol-education course courtesy of the Institution. The class met on Fridays; she heard the frat parties’ music through the cinder-block walls.Once, we counted all the other rape survivors we knew. There should have been two hundred of us there, not twenty.And at the end of the semester, the Institution reported zero assaults. They hung banners in the halls.
Source: I Was Raped / I Was Battered – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics
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