To the Editor:
There have been a lot of conversations generated by the Janus Forum event, “How Should Colleges Handle Sexual Assault?” To respond, two alternative spaces were created: the “BWell Safe Space” and “The Research on Rape Culture,” a lecture by Lindsay Orchowski, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior. Both of these events were planned to be at the same time as the Janus Forum debate, which is a decision that many have taken issue with. As one of the planners of Orchowski’s talk, I want to be very clear about why we did this.
In a letter written to President Christina Paxson, which five student members of the Task Force on Sexual Assault signed, we wrote, “The arguments that Wendy McElroy makes are highly likely to cause secondary trauma to survivors and their supporters and would seem contrary to the University’s legal and moral obligations concerning sexual violence. Though traumatic, survivors likely would attend the event in order to have their voices heard and stand as a visible refutation of McElroy’s ideas.” Having a separate, University-sponsored event that argues that rape culture isn’t a debate, but a reality, takes that pressure off of survivors to prove themselves. It creates a space where there is room to debate interpretations and policy about these realities, but asserts that rape culture is a reality.
Without alternative events, the pressure is put on survivors to go and listen to comments that might be harmful in order to refute them. The pressure is on survivors to show up and put their own experiences up for debate. We live in a culture where fears of false accusations are often put ahead of the need to show compassion to survivors. Too often we demand that survivors offer us their experiences to scrutinize in order for us to deem them credible or honest. Orchowski’s talk grounds us in research that affirms the experiences of survivors of sexual assault on campus, which is a necessary and direct alternative to the debate, allowing survivors to choose which narratives they want to be exposed to.
In its recent column in The Herald (“In response to President Paxson’s most recent email,” Nov. 17), the Janus Forum wrote, “When students are forced to choose, events no longer serve to ‘provide the community with more research and facts about these important issues,’ as Paxson hoped for in her email.” I want to take a moment to dissect this language. While I believe it wasn’t meant to connote this, implying that choice is a thing you are forced to do — implying that choice is a burden — is disturbingly similar to rhetoric that we shouldn’t give survivors of sexual assault choices — for example whether or not they want to go to the police, because they shouldn’t be forced to make those decisions from a place of trauma. This rhetoric is infantilizing and designed to limit the agency of survivors of sexual assault. We cannot have informed conversations about sexual assault without the views of survivors, and in order to create spaces where survivors are safe to share their stories, we need to create spaces that affirm survivor agency.
At the heart of the alternative events is the belief that having choices allows people to exercise agency. When we center our conversation around a group of people who have had a lot of choice and agency taken away from them, the only sensitive thing to do is create options and ways to reclaim agency and power. Having these events at the same time takes pressure off of survivors to assert their humanity and additionally provides an opportunity to assert agency over the types of narratives that survivors hear.
Katherine Byron ’15
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