What It’s Like…..a letter to assaulters and their enablers
It’s been nearly one month since I graduated UChicago, graduating with a degree in Creative Writing with honors as a First Generation, Low-income Black student. I still don’t know how to process that reality, maybe because I graduated in a pandemic, that my graduation ceremony was merely just a short hour—though then again, it was probably the best representation of my last year of college anyway.
However, you didn’t click on this to hear (well, read might be the better word but you get the point) me sulk about how horrible of a year this was for college students, though in many ways, the title of this post still fits in with why I haven’t felt satisfied about being done with college and the events that happened this year. Because in many ways, I don’t want college to be over, because there are so many lessons that I fear and know that many have not learned, understood, nor acknowledged: the way we still don’t care about survivors.
From UChicago, to TikTok, to Academia, to the world: You all hate survivors. You do. You don’t actually care about survivors or actually want to support survivors, end rape culture, etc. You don’t. Because frankly, you don’t understand how to treat people’s trauma and lives with empathy and humanity; as reality, not a reality show or drama.
Last April, I came out publicly about my experiences with sexual assault at UChicago. That same academic year, I wrote a short auto-fiction story that allowed me to process one of the first times I was sexual assaulted back in High School. That story, about 8-10 pages on Microsoft Word, were some of the most important 8-10 pages I’ve ever written. Writing that story allowed me to process more about how sexual assault changes you and it helped me to process how the assaults I experienced in my first year changed me.
My experience of being assaulted by my gym teacher in high school impacted me. I don’t know how to swim and as of right now, I still don’t have any intention to learn how, because I’m scared for someone to teach me. So many of my close friends have wanted me to learn how to swim and it took me to write this story to finally explain to them why I never wanted to learn. To explain a reason beyond “water scares me.” People I trust, people that I love, I’m scared that the next person that will teach me how to swim will assault me the way he did. But it also taught me and reminded me about the way survivors are gaslighted and how I gaslighted myself. This teacher was someone who constantly had bonors during class. There were times he walked through the tables back in Drivers Ed and you felt him rub against you, or he’d stand close to you that it was right in front of you. If anyone from my high school is reading this, we all know this teacher because so many of us had this experience and when there were girls in my high school that attempted to report it they were shut down. That it was his last year. He was going to get pension soon. It didn’t happen or it happened so long ago. And this was a teacher that had done this to girls before I was in his class, before I’d came to my high school.
That’s where it starts. The gaslighting, the self-doubt, the repressed memories, the questions and the answers that you are so scared to share to others and yourself. If my high school’s administration, the teachers and faculty we are supposed to trust took these issues seriously, then maybe I could’ve learned how to swim that year or eventually learn because of my friends willingness to teach me. But my high school put the trauma many girls experienced by this man aside because they had a different fear: ABC7 News, CBS News, Twitter, Facebook, the knowing. Acknowledging that there was this person who hurt so many people and that they’d let it happen for so long, because likely there were other teachers in that school that have done the same or worse. Once that door was open, it would only be a matter of time. They didn’t want that, and honestly, Chicago Public Schools didn’t want it either.
This was high school, I haven’t even talked about UChicago yet but honestly, you could replace my high school with UChicago. Because all of these institutions are complicit in the gaslighting and enabling of rape culture.
I said earlier, I don’t want college to be over, because there are so many lessons that I fear and know that many have not learned, understood, nor acknowledged: the way we still don’t care about survivors.
The way students, don’t care about survivors.
Writing about my experiences in high school helped me to talk about what happened to me during the first four days of my Orientation Week (O-Week) at UChicago. Coming out about my experiences last year made me realize how my entire graduating class could sit through a one-hour graphic and frankly triggering sexual assault training in Ratner about sexual assault, knowing the night before and later that day, there were students in that room who’d do exactly what they were “trained” not to do. That every year, we’d complete that same triggering sexual assault training we got in our inbox, and right below that email, there would be an email about a student who was sexual assaulted, roofied, or raped in a dorm or an “off-campus non-university affiliated” frat house. In that gym during o-week, I was surrounded by classmates who wouldn't sexually assault another student, but when their friend was accused of sexual assault, used language to downplay the severity of it.
My trauma informs my everyday life, my decisions, my thoughts, everything. The same for many survivors on this campus. That’s why we are survivors, because we are literally, trying to survive. Trying to hold onto a branch that can never heal from the fire the burned its core and at any moment, the wood can snap and we’d fall to another branch that is just as delicate. Because we are surrounded my people who can be in leadership positions, could meet with admin about how to support students, while also being the same people that groups like Phoenix Survivors Alliance and UChicago Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Committee under Student Government formed to stop. Because maybe there are some people in Student Government that haven’t assaulted someone, but sure as hell know how to use language to ignore, deny and silence requests from survivors for accountability: from a committee that is full of survivors.
Accountability. Of all things. Students that I’ve graduated with, who want to be doctors, lawyers, law-makers, government workers, non-profit workers, counselors, researchers: they can’t even had a shread of accountability. Because protecting an image of an organization, of people was more important.
No one really cares about the strength it takes survivors to accept our trauma, the sleepless night survivors have the morning before we wake up, knowing that when we tell our story, our lives will change more than the person that have caused us to come forward.
No one cares about the tears you hold back at graduation, because your assaulters name is read aloud and your immediately taken back to the memory of what they did to you. I was not raped, but as I described previously in my last blog, when I was in the elevator with the person who assaulted me, I began to mentally prepare myself for them stop the elevator and hope that my screams would be loud enough for someone to hear me so that person couldn’t finish in me. I still have nightmares about what would’ve happened if my friend grab my hand to pull me out of the grip that guy had on my vagina when he was trying to finger me underneath my dress. How, he would've dragged me out of the dance floor and taken me to one of the rooms in DU and I’d experience it completely sober, because at the time I wasn’t strong enough to get out of his grip. I started Jiu Jitsu and found so many close friends, but the first motivation for starting it was to make sure I was strong enough and had the skills to make sure no one could hurt me.
But no one cares about that.
That is “rape culture”. That is what being an enabler is. That you share on your twitter, Facebook, Instagram stories and if you’re “really cool”, your instagram feed, about how to listen and advocate for survivors, while using the same methods that has been used to silence us.
The last two years of college for me has been learning to process my trauma as a survivor and unlearning the way I’ve gaslighted and ignored what I’ve been through. It will take the rest of my life.
The worst thing that happens to assaulters and enablers, sometimes they go to jail or get suspended or expelled. Or a lot of the times, they become doctors, lawyers, Billionaires, founders of Fortune 500s, some of them Senators, Supreme Court Justices, or Presidents.
So, to the students that graduated with me, the students that remain and are coming into my now alma matter, and to a society that has let survivors like me down. This is not a “do better plea” or even an “education yourself plea”. This is a “shut up, listen and actually change.” Because i’m so tired of watching my back walking from Trader Joes to walking to my friend’s apartment so we can go bouldering, sending my location to the group chat whenever i’m alone with someone at a restaurant or in a library, pretending to be on the phone when someone looks my way, scared about what would happen if I say no to someone who wants to get my number.
I want to live.
