how to start an essay about sexual assault

AGNI is publishing this essay as part of The Ferrante Project.

“What would happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser asks in her oft-quoted poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” “if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open.” Over the past few years, I’ve begun to question the truth of that statement, especially as it relates to telling the truth about sexual violence. What is the purpose and function of writing about rape? More to the point, what to me is the purpose and function of writing when writing about my rape?

These questions grew more painful to consider after I published my first book, which examined the long-term effects of violence and survival, and more painful still when I learned this book had ended up on the reading lists of various feminist tastemakers on Twitter, one of whom noted that she was using the book as a writing prompt for her students’ exploration of violence. Thus my personal experience was to become a jumping-off point for others’ creativity, my descriptions of my assault disseminated and refracted through the exercises of strangers so they could understand the effects of such violence themselves. My assault would thus become both symbol and trope, something that could be parsed and imitated until all the rage and humanness drained out of it.  I had always known, of course, that this one of the possible outcomes of publishing such a book, especially one that ended up in the maw of social media. But actually reading this student’s response to my essay, in which my assault was reimagined and repeated back to me in her language, made me feel both sickened and small.

Speak truth to power, writers and non-writers alike declaim, and now I’ve seen this phrase trickle through the feeds of people on Facebook and Twitter. The aim is to tell the truth of our lives as we see it, as directly and with as little remorse as possible. Such an outpouring of personal testimony has indeed cracked open the world, in part by reminding participants in social media that the things most American institutions want to forget about our nation—its violence against people of color, its killing of LGBTQ people, its seemingly implacable hatred of women and their bodies—stubbornly persist. There is indeed a power and value to truth-telling. But truth-telling relies on narrative, and narrative telling—even supposedly artless, immediate telling—is in fact crafted. It wants a particular response, and nothing crafts language so effectively as a Web format that requires you to express yourself in 280 characters or less, and sells these truth-telling nuggets in a stream of visual media, making it impossible for the audience to focus on any but the most extreme, compelling, and direct language.

Social media and truth-telling both encourage the reader, primarily, to emote. And having emoted, having felt all the things and thought all the thoughts the writer has asked us to think and feel within that limited format, we can walk away from the engagement satisfied with the blunt, brute fact of our feelings. Social media offers a veneer of authenticity that claims the authority of survivorship and thus makes autobiography and resilience satisfactory political goals.

A memoir about sexual assault guarantees a certain amount of attention, because it is sensational and because writing about violence encourages a kind of voyeurism. But while this may be one possible response, it is not this writer’s desire to make the reader participate in the imagined reconstruction of violence. And reconstructing another person’s trauma is not what we teach other budding writers about the purpose of testimonies of violence, in particular the testimonies of violence that women might produce. If anything, we argue, women’s testimonies should inspire not empathy (or not only empathy) but political outrage, in large part because women’s autobiographical writing has been so effectively suppressed over centuries. Women’s writing about violence serves as a public novelty, one which, if it does not always receive the social stamp of high art, at least promises an authentic expression of rage, of grief, of endurance and survival, and—most powerfully—of hope.

But I’m not actually that interested in resilience. I want jail time for offenders. I want politicians tossed out of office, priests defrocked, federal judges fired and replaced. I want a country that doesn’t treat violence against women as sexual entertainment.

Over the past year, I’ve begun to hate the book I published. The more I read from and talk about it, the more politically and aesthetically suspicious my own writing appears to me. Who had I written it for? Who did I really imagine as its audience? The project started, in part, as a reaction to the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which got me thinking about the ways in which sex discrimination has shaped my working life, which got me thinking about the sexual assault I experienced as a twenty-year-old woman at a coat factory where I worked one summer as a down stuffer along with several itinerant workers, one of whom attacked me. The book was finally published around the time that our current president, then a presidential candidate, admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy,” which made the #MeToo hashtag started by Tarana Burke in 2006 erupt into a firestorm. Into this storm my book was tossed, and while I was happy at first to add my voice to the movement, over time I began to feel that the book sounded less like me than an automated reply. Using the same language that has characterized the experience of so many other women certainly brings me into community with them, but that shared language also makes the stories of survivors feel depressingly interchangeable and flat.

Perhaps this flattening is created in part by our social expectations about female psychology and women’s writing, in particular our assumption that women’s writing is primarily or only autobiographical, not imaginative, and that it stems from an institutionally disadvantaged position that we equate with pain. This, too, enrages me. It feels as though, because I am female, I was born into this language and psychology; as a woman and a writer, I am a grievance waiting to be heard and endured. At times it feels that the best I can do is pay close attention to that grievance, to give it a slightly different shape and coloration. By writing about my assault, I confirm the most inarguably authentic position of the not-male, and also the not-white: the pained, the wounded, the helpless, the small .

To speak about one’s assault in a way that feels actually authentic is to thread the needle through an incredibly slender eye, made ever more narrow: by the pressure of therapeutic services, which argue that such narratives are not only good, but necessary for psychic healing; political and social institutions, where truth-telling makes for good rallying cries and possible legislation; and by social media, which argues for ever more devastating expressions of the self to be streamed and consumed and disseminated.

Effective writing about violence shares many of the aesthetic traits of political language, which is to say its directness resists excessive or subtle interpretation. It compresses time and context in order to focus on the moment at hand. Writing about violence authenticates itself through the performance of immediacy and vivid feeling. This is what suggests truth—and it is surprisingly, distressingly easy to duplicate.

The social media performances of grief, selfhood, and outrage I daily read feel suspiciously like masquerades. In my feeds, writers try to outshine and outthink the politicians and abusers inspiring our outrage, using language whose nuance rarely rises above theirs. In this way, we are shackled to victimizing doubles. As much as I despise the self-help books, the prayer circles, the thin whine of grief on Twitter and its overuse of the word trauma , the only identity that seems unable to be challenged or shamed is that of the victim. Thus I and others willingly write into and about how we have been diminished or shamed, to stop ourselves from being attacked by those claiming to be more morally progressive online, because the only way to keep yourself safe within that group, it seems, is to become the witting accomplice to your own self-objectification.

Refracting and repeating narratives of violence also risk downplaying or even ignoring matters of race and class in favor of the sensational act itself, even as race and class make violence a more or less likely experience for a person to have. It is not lost on me, for example, that I come from a middle-class family and was attacked by someone skirting the poverty line, that what brought us together was a coat factory that relied on both our labor to exist: me, the mixed-race college student earning money for her next year’s tuition; my attacker, a white man who moved from job to job, city to city, aimless and resentful of the opportunities I would have in a world he imagined pandered to minorities. It is not lost on my either that the stories we repeat most often online are those told by and about middle and upper middle class white women. Our retweeting and sharing of these stories replicates the culture’s co-opting of Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag into the world of (largely) white and (largely) middle-class feminism.

The young student, consciously or unconsciously, performed this co-option when she imitated my writing. She understood that some part of writing about and against violence, especially the violence that women experience, is imitative and coercive. One does not have to be a victim of violence to render that violence believably or powerfully. The actual experience of an assault may be private, it may reveal the world to be artless and cruel, but the sharing of it depends entirely on creative skills, detailed images, and ideas of identities that can be appropriated.

 Even as I write this, it strikes me that perhaps I’m wrong to think we’ve become numb to, or jaded about, female narratives of pain. I think back to that look on Arizona senator Jeff Flake’s face in the elevator as he fled the Kavanaugh hearings, the moment when a protester pried apart the elevator doors to demand he hear about the assault she’d survived. I see again the pain twist across his face. Perhaps the reason the #MeToo movement hasn’t achieved more substantial victories for women is not that its language has started to feel formulaic, but that it really is too painful for people to witness. It’s too painful because it asks those who have not suffered to imagine the limits of their physical invulnerability—to realize, if only empathetically, that their sense of self-protection is a fantasy. We turn away from the language of violence not because it has become anodyne, but because we see how easily each of us can be made a victim.

“Perhaps writers like us really can change the world,” one young woman wrote to me recently in a private Twitter message. “Your book inspired me to tell my own story. You can check out my feed.” I thumbed down the screen to read it, the words of this stranger who, like me, was humiliated and hurt, raw and furious, her own terrible story wedged now between video grabs from a Trump rally and a trailer for John Wick 3 . I stopped reading and her story flickered past. I wrote privately to thank her, added a few glib notes of praise, and told her I hoped she’d continue writing. Then I deleted her message.

The Ferrante Project: The freedom of anonymity brings together sixteen women writers of color (alongside sixteen visual artists in a linked project with the Warhol Museum) who anonymously contributed new works in response to, or critique of, the cult of personality, posturing, and preemptive celebrity of writers at the expense—sometimes—of the quality and provocation of the work itself. This is a collaboration between Aster(ix) and CAAPP: Center of African American Poetry and Poetics.

Contributors include Angie Cruz, Sarah Gambito, Dawn Lundy Martin, Khadijah Queen, Ru Freeman, Ayana Mathis, Vi khi nao, Cristina García  Cathy Linh Che, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Deborah Paredez, Emily Raboteau, Paisley Rekdal, Natalie Díaz, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and Jamey Hatley.

This page collects the works of anonymous writers published by  AGNI.

• Covering Trump
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The voice of journalism

The right way to write about rape

A panel offers tips for navigating the charged terrain of reporting on sexual assault and domestic violence.

When Claudia Garcia-Rojas , an activist and advocate from Chicago, began assembling her toolkit for journalists covering sexual assault, she surveyed hundreds of articles searching for positive examples. She found two. “And they weren’t even stories about rape, they were stories about covering rape,” says Garcia-Rojas.

Here’s what she found in the rest: leading language, scant statistics, and a whole lot of victim blaming. “What often happens in these stories is that the victims are considered guilty, and the rapists are considered innocent,” she told the handful of women (and only women) who gathered at the offices of Women’s eNews last week for a seminar on navigating the tricky ethics of covering sexual assault and domestic violence.

A recent slew of media flubs (including coverage of sexual assaults in Steubenville, OH) have brought prominence to examples of poor reporting. According to Garcia-Rojas, articles with leading language and shaky statistics are not just badly written; they propagate rape culture and make it difficult for survivors to recount their assault. Doing better requires consideration of the survivor, even before a reporter starts writing:· Make sure your story won’t compromise the safety of the survivor. Also consider the perpetrator, especially if he or she hasn’t been convicted.

· Be honest that you are a journalist, and be honest about the angle of your article. “You can’t approach a victim and say, ‘I’m interested in your story,’” and then write a sensationalizing headline that mischaracterizes what they tell you, says Garcia-Rojas. “You need to establish rapport.”

· Don’t share your personal stories during the interview—it’s a story about the survivor, not the journalist and, no, you can’t relate. Also, don’t ask too many incendiary “why” questions. “‘Why did you go to the store with that man? Why do you think you were raped?’ This implies victim blaming,” says Garcia-Rojas.

· Recognize that victims of trauma tell their stories in fragments and not chronologically. “It’s not good to say: ‘Oh, but you just said it happened this way,’” she said.

Once you begin writing, using appropriate language requires careful consideration. Commonly used verbs such as “alleged,” “admits,” and “confesses” insert shame and uncertainty into quotes; instead, Garcia-Rojas recommends a simple “said.” Similarly, phrases like “fondle,” “engaged in,” and even “oral sex,” are words used during consensual sex and should not be used to describe rape. Instead, Garcia-Rojas recommends a blunt description of actions, such as, “He forced his penis into her mouth.”

“If we read that we’re like, ‘Wow, this is what happened to this person,’” she says. (You can read through the full list of recommendations in the Chicago Taskforce’s Media Guidelines .)

Rita Henley Jensen, editor in chief of Women’s eNews , urged journalists to use statistics to tell a larger story—especially for common and garish narratives such as the eponymous: “Man shoots wife, kills self.” Though statistically, women who separate from men are at their highest point of risk for violence, articles typically portray the shooters as an abnormality.

“Like: Oh, he was such a regular guy! Nothing troubled in the marriage! Would you believe that?” says Henley Jensen. “But everything that living on this planet teaches you says that there’s a different story: Some people are very nice to their neighbors and not so nice to their wives.” A simple restructuring—including the statistic and moving a comment about a past threat closer to the top—gives a more accurate picture of the origins of the event. (Read Henley Jensen’s full rewrite here .
) “I mean, the woman’s dead, and you didn’t see trouble in the marriage,” she said.

Journalists should be especially on guard for troubling ideas that come from sources. “What do you do when everyone is victim blaming?” asked one reporter in the audience. “When you have 50 people in a town and they’re all saying, ‘She was a slut.’ How can you not include that?” According to Garcia-Rojas, reporters should be constantly questioning when to include a quote and when to dismiss it—or, even better, include the quote alongside an explanation of the troubling culture it underlies.

“These people are talking from within a culture of rape and violence that is sadly prevalent in our society,” says Garcia-Rojas. “It’s our job to know better and to start telling a different kind of story.”

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today .

Journalism is now the second draft of history

By james harkin.

In the age of the relentless media fact-check, reading the news often feels like hearing a punch-line deflated before you catch the body of the joke. Free-floating fact-checking initiatives have lately become big (non-profit) business. In an industry—the written media—whose...

The newspaper that #MeToo missed

By jennifer robison, palestinian citizens of israel struggle to tell their stories, by miriam berger, what a report from germany teaches us about investigating algorithms, by nicholas diakopoulos.

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Unsubstantiated: An Essay of Sexual Violence

Susan straight on what it really means to believe women.

There is no documentation for these narratives. Call them what you wish. This cannot be fact checked. There are no police reports/medical examinations/official statements/newspaper stories. No proof in the way that you want proof. No paper trail. Only story. That’s what women have had forever. How can we ascertain whether any of this is true? Where did your friend/cousin/sister/teammate tell you this? She told me in the bleachers/near the lockers/in the gym/in my car/in the dorm room/with the candles lit/in the driveway/on the train/in the parking lot.

This is not he said/she said, because we said these things only to each other. Every day, in the southern California city where I was born and still live, I drive past the places where we were attacked. Passing the parking lots where my friends and I were in cars, I remember the silver mushrooms of the door locks. We took rides home from football games and house parties. Gas, grass or ass—no one rides for free. I remember the bumper sticker on vans, cars, trucks. Does this hurt? Does this hurt ? What about that? Not murmured in apology, but in anticipation. We were 14. We did not ride for free. We were told if we walked home, worse could happen to us.

I drive past the bleachers at the park where my brothers played Little League. I worked the snack bar because girls didn’t play baseball. We sold snacks. In the dark storage room behind the bleachers. I was 12. The two boys only a year older. First base and you can go . Do boys still use that term now?

I write this because women asked me to. Last year, I finally put into narrative form some stories of my life and my friends, cousins, relatives. I was told the essays could not be published because they could not be fact checked, and the phrase I learned as a college journalist, even as men were groping and attacking me then, came back like a finger poked against my spine. The details we remember? Insignificant. The events themselves, if we told someone, if we asked for help, would have been deemed insignificant, because we were insignificant as girls, and then women. Now years have passed, so the details cannot be verified. But we told each other. What we remember is rooted in the body and the senses: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford remembering her bathing suit, E. Jean Carroll remembering the lace of the underwear she was holding, the young women remembering the exact painting on the wall of the “massage room” of Jeffrey Epstein, and now that he is dead, there is no he said/she said . There is only the bravery that they told someone what happened.

I am 58 years old. Weekly I drive past the parking lot where at a broken cement stop, my 15-year-old friend and I sat side by side, our knees before us in our shorts, as it was summer, while she told me about the boy who’d raped her the night before. He was two years older than we were. He knew exactly what he was doing. He gained her trust over weeks. He talked more than any other boy we knew. She put her forearms on her knees and put her face into that cradle and I remember the back of her neck. That was 1976. I believed rape inevitable, and I didn’t want to have a baby by someone who attacked me, so I went to Planned Parenthood.

In their testified memories, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was 15, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh 17. They spoke quite separately, their sentences braiding together in vividly different threads. They grew up in the same place. They have friends and acquaintances who brought forth their own memories. It seems undeniable that something happened, on that night. The only written record was a calendar kept by a high school boy. Often, men confronted with the memories of sexual violence recalled by women deny them altogether, as if we fabricated not only the hurt but the entire night or series of weeks or months or years. That never happened. I was never there. She is mistaken. Her very existence is called into question. It’s as if two cars collided, both were damaged, but one driver insists he and his vehicle were never even at the scene, though the other car is smashed and dented and sometimes, completely totaled.

What were you wearing/drinking/thinking/expecting/when you went to the party? What did you say to make him think that’s what you wanted/what was he led to believe? We were in the wrong place of our own accord: meaning we entered a structure while alive and expecting nothing. I remember strange details about one house party. New Year’s Eve, 1977. My future husband and I were high school seniors. The house in a neighborhood wealthier than ours, abutting the foothills of our southern California city, more than a hundred people, dancing inside, moving through the kitchen, congregating to drink in the front yard.

A man staggering across the street toward us, maybe 25, older, with black hair in long wings down his face and neck, bellbottom jeans, blood covering his right hand, dripping from a cut. I was the kind of girl who corralled him quickly before he could get in trouble with the athletes, including my boyfriend. We were black, white, Mexican-American, Japanese-American. He was olive skinned, delirious, mumbling. I steered him inside the house, into the bathroom. I remember the beautiful gilt-edged mirror, so 1970s. I propelled him by the elbow toward the sink, and quickly he turned, locked the door, and grabbed my breasts, covering the front of my white sweater, featuring thin gold-thread horizontal stripes, with bloody handprints. (My first thought: Damn, I paid $17.98 for this sweater! Most of my paycheck for the week!) (My second thought: He’s going to rape and kill me.) He broke a perfume bottle on the sink and stood there, daring me to move. I don’t remember what he said, because I didn’t look at his mouth, only at the blood dripping on the white shag rug and the jagged glass thrust toward me.

I remember this distinctly: the music was so loud no one would have heard me scream. After what seemed like hours, the hand holding the glass slanting back and forth like a cobra’s head, boy pounded on the door shouting, “Who the fuck is in there? We gotta drain the lizard! Are you girls in there putting your fuckin makeup on? Open the door!” Then they broke it open with their shoulders. Baseball players. I still see the face of the first baseball player, golden brown, and his curly natural; I still see him now and then in my city. He saved me. They punched the man, dragged him outside and called the police. But none of the officers asked me anything. They took him away without speaking to me. My future husband was angry that I’d been so stupid. Someone gave me a letterman jacket to cover the blood on my breasts, because he said it made him feel sick. But I had to give it back before my future husband took me home. If we were in a car or workplace accident, or military battle, or natural disaster, we would be “in shock.” My teeth chattered in the silence. At home, I washed my sweater that night. Dried blood is hard to get out, but I had three brothers. I was good at bloodstained laundry. I wore that sweater for years.

I remember the places. Sewer pipe on the elementary school playground/back seat of a car/front seat of a car/stairwell in college/dorm room/office of a teaching assistant/lab of a chemical engineer at work. I remember the college-educated chemist 30 years older than me, as I was 20, held the back of my bra as if it were a harness and I a small horse merely trying to get across the room to do my work. He was out to prove I couldn’t leave until he allowed me to. He said, every time, that he was merely checking to make sure I was wearing a bra. That reminded me so vividly of sixth grade I didn’t even know how to react, and then I just refused to go into that workspace and was disciplined. I do not remember the dates, or the floor of the building. I remember the beakers on the counter.

What room of the house/seat of the car/kind of carpet/part of the couch/area of the yard/end of the pool/section of the bleachers/corner of the store/row of the theater/where the alleged assault took place? Was it a twin bed/queen/king? What was the day/week/year/time? What was the make and model of the car/truck/van/camper? The address of the house? Which bedroom? How many bedrooms were there? (Did we girls ask that question the minute we arrived at the party? Did someone give us a tour, so we could identify the master bedroom, the bedspread, the bathroom? Should that be standard?) How many people were there? (Guest lists, also standard?) What time were you taken/forced/carried/or did you voluntarily go into the bedroom/bathroom/garden shed/kitchen/basement/closet/office/laboratory? Who saw you enter that place? Who saw you leave? If you were hurt, how were you able to walk?

Every time I hear the song “Sexual Healing,” by Marvin Gaye, and it is played often, I remember another high school friend in my car, angry and then weeping. The song was new. She reacted violently, telling me to turn it off. She said the lyrics were disgusting. She whispered the words that made her cry. You’re my medicine/Open up and let me in. An adult in her family had forced his way into the place where she slept, and raped her. She was so shaken hearing those words, and I was so shaken when she told me, that I turn the song off, even now.

Every time I enter my kitchen, I remember a woman sitting at the maple table my mother bought when I was three. Eight years ago, both of us grown, she told me how her mother had been assaulted repeatedly by an adult man when she was a girl. Ten years old. Her mother told no one, until one morning the girl couldn’t walk to school. She had advanced syphilis. The woman said, “They never told us who he was! And later same thing happened to me. But I told! I told them!” She told only her mother and grandmother.

Why didn’t you report this? I did. Who did you report it to? My sister/mother/aunt/grandmother/cousin/friend. What did that person do? She listened/cried/hit me/hugged me/washed me/cried/combed my hair/washed sewed dyed dried burned my clothes/cried/shook her head/said she knew/said that couldn’t be true/said she’d kill him/said he’d kill me/said get in the car/said we’ll never tell anyone/said I love you.

We could tell you: the smell/gum/whiskers/one finger/two fingers/three/fingernails/rings/song/engine/bedspread/the smell/carpet like stiff worms/carpet like cement/burns on our shoulders/above our hipbones/our tailbones/astroturf/leather / vinyl/Naugahyde/grooved metal bleachers/asphalt/jeans/zippers/metal teeth drawing blood/human teeth drawing blood/braces/bracelets/dog tags/Irish Spring/cologne/four fingers a solid gate over our mouths/French fries/hot sauce/motor oil/there is no name for the inside of a knuckle pressed hard on our lips.

Last month, I sat with a cousin in the dim light of her living room, 100 degrees outside, security screen door letting in the noise of the street. We talked about house parties. She told me about the night when she was 12, at a house party a few blocks from where we were, and an older boy, maybe 19, bumped and bumped against her while they danced until she was in a hallway and then in a bedroom. Having been raised in Los Angeles during the Black Panther movement, she talked him out of assault by bringing up unity, the violence already done to her school and family by police, and his responsibilities to her as a young black man she called brother. That was 1970.

I told her about the 1977 house party and the sweater. We laughed about the sweater. I told her about the dorm room two years later, where a large athlete lay on top of me, threatening rape, and that I invoked our male cousin, who had an Uzi, and would arrive in the morning to shoot off the athlete’s testicles. If I told. I didn’t tell anyone, because the man removed his forearm from my throat and got up, and I left.

Then I told her about the doctor. He might have been 50. Sixty. I was 13. I remember only: glasses shining like small lakes in the bright reflection of the high-powered light. Does that hurt? Does that? What about that? I am lying on a table. No clothes. Shivering uncontrollably in the frigid air. A tube. He stands in the doorway watching. Maybe he was filming, I realize now. Maybe just watching. My mother is in a waiting room far away. She thinks I have a bladder infection. The bare metal table is swimming with my tears, running into my hair and down my neck. He tortures me for a long time, or for half an hour. Was I restrained—by equipment, or by obedience? I have no details for that.

This is what my cousin did not say. Let’s review/Let’s make sure you have your story straight/Let’s go over this again/Let’s assume you’re not exaggerating/misremembering/dreaming/telling tale tales/being dramatic because you were a teenaged girl/menstruating/hysterical/looking for attention.

I had never told anyone, not my mother or anyone else. But this year, writing about my childhood, I remembered. I have always been afraid to go to doctors, or to the hospital. But at an appointment with a nurse/practitioner, for a possible minor surgery, the first time we’d ever met, I told her why I was afraid of even minor procedures, why I had never spent the night in a hospital since my third daughter was born, in 1995. I had that child 17 minutes after arriving in labor and delivery because I didn’t want to go inside.

I avoided doctors for so long that I got severe anemia, detached retinas, and other illnesses. We sat two feet from each other, our knees companionable. She told me that when she was four, in the rural place where she was raised, a boy had threatened her with a knife and told her to pull down her pants. She told me that when she was 12, in a field across from her house, a man pulled up in a car and asked for directions, opened the door and said things so shocking and dirty that she ran into the fields to hide. She told me that when she was a young nurse, a physician had casually affixed a sticker to her uniformed breast. She protested vehemently. Though she saw him pull other nurses onto his lap, and affix stickers to them, he never approached her again. I cried, just a little, with this woman I had known for 20 minutes. She tended to my physical ailment. I went home, grateful. That night, I picked apricots from my tree and took them to my cousin, and we sat in the heated dark room on her couch for three hours. We told stories of our aunts, our grandmothers, of razors slashing clothes, of guns pulled from coats, of girls who survived and told only each other. We might never tell anyone else. We told someone. We told a woman. We are alive. It is documented in our mouths.

———————————————

Susan Straight’s memoir,  In the Country of Women   is now available from Catapult. 

Susan Straight

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4.4 Violence against Women: Rape and Sexual Assault

Learning objectives.

• Describe the extent of rape and sexual assault.
• Explain why rape and sexual assault occur.

Susan Griffin (1971, p. 26) began a classic essay on rape in 1971 with this startling statement: “I have never been free of the fear of rape. From a very early age I, like most women, have thought of rape as a part of my natural environment—something to be feared and prayed against like fire or lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of the many mysteries of human nature.”

When we consider interpersonal violence of all kinds—homicide, assault, robbery, and rape and sexual assault—men are more likely than women to be victims of violence. While true, this fact obscures another fact: Women are far more likely than men to be raped and sexually assaulted. They are also much more likely to be portrayed as victims of pornographic violence on the Internet and in videos, magazines, and other outlets. Finally, women are more likely than men to be victims of domestic violence , or violence between spouses and others with intimate relationships. The gendered nature of these acts against women distinguishes them from the violence men suffer. Violence is directed against men not because they are men per se, but because of anger, jealousy, and the sociological reasons discussed in Chapter 8 “Crime and Criminal Justice” ’s treatment of deviance and crime. But rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, and pornographic violence are directed against women precisely because they are women. These acts are thus an extreme manifestation of the gender inequality women face in other areas of life. We discuss rape and sexual assault here but will leave domestic violence for Chapter 10 “The Changing Family” and pornography for Chapter 9 “Sexual Behavior” .

The Extent and Context of Rape and Sexual Assault

Our knowledge about the extent and context of rape and reasons for it comes from three sources: the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), both discussed in Chapter 8 “Crime and Criminal Justice” , and surveys of and interviews with women and men conducted by academic researchers. From these sources we have a fairly good if not perfect idea of how much rape occurs, the context in which it occurs, and the reasons for it. What do we know?

Up to one-third of US women experience a rape or sexual assault, including attempts, at least once in their lives.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

According to the UCR, which are compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from police reports, 88,767 reported rapes (including attempts, and defined as forced sexual intercourse) occurred in the United States in 2010 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011). Because women often do not tell police they were raped, the NCVS, which involves survey interviews of thousands of people nationwide, probably yields a better estimate of rape; the NCVS also measures sexual assaults in addition to rape, while the UCR measures only rape. According to the NCVS, 188,380 rapes and sexual assaults occurred in 2010 (Truman, 2011). Other research indicates that up to one-third of US women will experience a rape or sexual assault, including attempts, at least once in their lives (Barkan, 2012). A study of a random sample of 420 Toronto women involving intensive interviews yielded an even higher figure: Two-thirds said they had experienced at least one rape or sexual assault, including attempts. The researchers, Melanie Randall and Lori Haskell (1995, p. 22), concluded that “it is more common than not for a woman to have an experience of sexual assault during their lifetime.”

Studies of college students also find a high amount of rape and sexual assault. About 20–30 percent of women students in anonymous surveys report being raped or sexually assaulted (including attempts), usually by a male student they knew beforehand (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000; Gross, Winslett, Roberts, & Gohm, 2006). Thus at a campus of 10,000 students of whom 5,000 are women, about 1,000–1,500 women will be raped or sexually assaulted over a period of four years, or about 10 per week in a four-year academic calendar. The Note 4.33 “People Making a Difference” box describes what one group of college students did to help reduce rape and sexual assault at their campus.

People Making a Difference

College Students Protest against Sexual Violence

Dickinson College is a small liberal-arts campus in the small town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But in the fight against sexual violence, it loomed huge in March 2011, when up to 150 students conducted a nonviolent occupation of the college’s administrative building for three days to protest rape and sexual assault on their campus. While they read, ate, and slept inside the building, more than 250 other students held rallies outside, with the total number of protesters easily exceeding one-tenth of Dickinson’s student enrollment. The protesters held signs that said “Stop the silence, our safety is more important than your reputation” and “I value my body, you should value my rights.” One student told a reporter, “This is a pervasive problem. Almost every student will tell you they know somebody who’s experienced sexual violence or have experienced it themselves.”

Feeling that college officials had not done enough to help protect Dickinson’s women students, the students occupying the administrative building called on the college to set up an improved emergency system for reporting sexual assaults, to revamp its judicial system’s treatment of sexual assault cases, to create a sexual violence prevention program, and to develop a new sexual misconduct policy.

Rather than having police or security guards take the students from the administrative building and even arrest them, Dickinson officials negotiated with the students and finally agreed to their demands. Upon hearing this good news, the occupying students left the building on a Saturday morning, suffering from a lack of sleep and showers but cheered that they had won their demands. A college public relations official applauded the protesters, saying they “have indelibly left their mark on the college. We’re all very proud of them.” On this small campus in a small town in Pennsylvania, a few hundred college students had made a difference.

Sources: Jerving, 2011; Pitz, 2011

The public image of rape is of the proverbial stranger attacking a woman in an alleyway. While such rapes do occur, most rapes actually happen between people who know each other. A wide body of research finds that 60–80 percent of all rapes and sexual assaults are committed by someone the woman knows, including husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends, and only 20–35 percent by strangers (Barkan, 2012). A woman is thus two to four times more likely to be raped by someone she knows than by a stranger.

In 2011, sexual assaults of hotel housekeepers made major headlines after the head of the International Monetary Fund was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper in New York City; the charges were later dropped because the prosecution worried about the housekeeper’s credibility despite forensic evidence supporting her claim. Still, in the wake of the arrest, news stories reported that hotel housekeepers sometimes encounter male guests who commit sexual assault, make explicit comments, or expose themselves. A hotel security expert said in one news story, “These problems happen with some regularity. They’re not rare, but they’re not common either.” A housekeeper recalled in the same story an incident when she was vacuuming when a male guest appeared: “[He] reached to try to kiss me behind my ear. I dropped my vacuum, and then he grabbed my body at the waist, and he was holding me close. It was very scary.” She ran out of the room when the guest let her leave but did not call the police. A hotel workers union official said housekeepers often refused to report sexual assault and other incidents to the police because they were afraid they would not be believed or that they would get fired if they did so (Greenhouse, 2011, p. B1).

Explaining Rape and Sexual Assault

Sociological explanations of rape fall into cultural and structural categories similar to those presented earlier for sexual harassment. Various “rape myths” in our culture support the absurd notion that women somehow enjoy being raped, want to be raped, or are “asking for it” (Franiuk, Seefelt, & Vandello, 2008). One of the most famous scenes in movie history occurs in the classic film Gone with the Wind , when Rhett Butler carries a struggling Scarlett O’Hara up the stairs. She is struggling because she does not want to have sex with him. The next scene shows Scarlett waking up the next morning with a satisfied, loving look on her face. The not-so-subtle message is that she enjoyed being raped (or, to be more charitable to the film, was just playing hard to get).

A related cultural belief is that women somehow ask or deserve to be raped by the way they dress or behave. If she dresses attractively or walks into a bar by herself, she wants to have sex, and if a rape occurs, well, then, what did she expect? In the award-winning film The Accused , based on a true story, actress Jodie Foster plays a woman who was raped by several men on top of a pool table in a bar. The film recounts how members of the public questioned why she was in the bar by herself if she did not want to have sex and blamed her for being raped.

A third cultural belief is that a man who is sexually active with a lot of women is a stud and thus someone admired by his male peers. Although this belief is less common in this day of AIDS and other STDs, it is still with us. A man with multiple sex partners continues to be the source of envy among many of his peers. At a minimum, men are still the ones who have to “make the first move” and then continue making more moves. There is a thin line between being sexually assertive and sexually aggressive (Kassing, Beesley, & Frey, 2005).

These three cultural beliefs—that women enjoy being forced to have sex, that they ask or deserve to be raped, and that men should be sexually assertive or even aggressive—combine to produce a cultural recipe for rape. Although most men do not rape, the cultural beliefs and myths just described help account for the rapes that do occur. Recognizing this, the contemporary women’s movement began attacking these myths back in the 1970s, and the public is much more conscious of the true nature of rape than a generation ago. That said, much of the public still accepts these cultural beliefs and myths, and prosecutors continue to find it difficult to win jury convictions in rape trials unless the woman who was raped had suffered visible injuries, had not known the man who raped her, and/or was not dressed attractively (Levine, 2006).

Structural explanations for rape emphasize the power differences between women and men similar to those outlined earlier for sexual harassment. In societies that are male dominated, rape and other violence against women is a likely outcome, as they allow men to demonstrate and maintain their power over women. Supporting this view, studies of preindustrial societies and of the fifty states of the United States find that rape is more common in societies where women have less economic and political power (Baron & Straus, 1989; Sanday, 1981). Poverty is also a predictor of rape; although rape in the United States transcends social class boundaries, it does seem more common among poorer segments of the population than among wealthier segments, as is true for other types of violence (Truman & Rand, 2010). Scholars think the higher rape rates among the poor stem from poor men trying to prove their “masculinity” by taking out their economic frustration on women (Martin, Vieraitis, & Britto, 2006).

Key Takeaways

• Up to one-third of US women experience a rape or sexual assault, including attempts, in their lifetime.
• Rape and sexual assault result from a combination of structural and cultural factors. In states and nations where women are more unequal, rape rates tend to be higher.

For Your Review

• What evidence and reasoning indicate that rape and sexual assault are not just the result of psychological problems affecting the men who engage in these crimes?
• Write a brief essay in which you critically evaluate the cultural beliefs that contribute to rape and sexual assault.

Barkan, S. E. (2012). Criminology: A sociological understanding (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Baron, L., & Straus, M. A. (1989). Four theories of rape in American society: A state-level analysis . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2011). Crime in the United States, 2010 . Washington, DC: Author.

Fisher, B. S., Cullen, F. T., & Turner, M. G. (2000). The sexual victimization of college women . Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

Franiuk, R., Seefelt, J., & Vandello, J. (2008). Prevalence of rape myths in headlines and their effects on attitudes toward rape. Sex Roles, 58 (11/12), 790–801.

Greenhouse, S. (2011, May 21). Sexual affronts a known hotel hazard. New York Times , p. B1.

Griffin, S. (1971, September). Rape: The all-American crime. Ramparts, 10 , 26–35.

Gross, A. M., Winslett, A., Roberts, M., & Gohm, C. L. (2006). An examination of sexual violence against college women. Violence Against Women, 12 , 288–300.

Jerving, S. (2011, March 4). Pennsylvania students protest against sexual violence and administrators respond. The Nation . Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/blog/159037/pennsylvania-students-protests-against-sexual-violence-and-administrators-respond .

Kassing, L. R., Beesley, D., & Frey, L. L. (2005). Gender role conflict, homophobia, age, and education as predictors of male rape myth acceptance. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 27 (4), 311–328.

Levine, K. L. (2006). The intimacy discount: Prosecutorial discretion, privacy, and equality in the statuory rape caseload. Emory Law Journal, 55 (4), 691–749.

Martin, K., Vieraitis, L. M., & Britto, S. (2006). Gender equality and women’s absolute status: A test of the feminist models of rape. Violence Against Women, 12 , 321–339.

Pitz, M. (2011, March 6). Dickinson College to change sexual assault policy after sit-in. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . Retrieved from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11065/1130102-1130454.stm .

Randall, M., & Haskell, L. (1995). Sexual violence in women’s lives: Findings from the women’s safety project, a community-based survey. Violence Against Women, 1 , 6–31.

Sanday, P. R. (1981). The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study. Journal of Social Issues, 37 , 5–27.

Truman, J. L., & Rand, M. R. (2010). Criminal victimization, 2009 . Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Social Problems Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Finding the Words We Need to Talk About Sexual Assault and Harassment

“Me too.” As the conversation around sexual assault has spread, it’s become clear that not everybody is prepared to talk about such a difficult issue.

These two words have ignited a conversation about sexual harassment and sexual violence that has spread across the internet in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s outing as a sexual predator . As that conversation has spread and deepened, however, it’s rapidly become clear that not everybody is prepared for talking about such a complicated and difficult issue. No wonder that alongside the seeds of understanding, healing and meaningful change as a result of #MeToo, we’re seeing widespread conflict, re-traumatization and reactionary backlash.

The idea of women using “Me too” as a way of sharing their experiences of sexualized violence dates back to a campaign started by Tarana Burke . The idea is simple: when people (not just women, but also men and gender queer folks) share their experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault, it makes survivors feel less alone, and helps raise public awareness of the extent of this problem. It’s a strategy that gained new momentum with an October 15 tweet from actress Alyssa Milano, which triggered millions of #MeToo tweets and posts all across the Internet .

As often happens when people join an online conversation, people come to the table with radically different experiences — and radically different stakes.  The sheer volume of posts around #MeToo all but guaranteed we would see conflict and hurt feelings among the various folks coming to the table: People who are for the first time describing, acknowledging or even remembering their experiences of sexual assault or harassment. Men who are trying to express support or regret, without the language to do it kindly and cleanly. Gender queer or male sexual assault, harassment, and abuse survivors who feel silenced or left out. Spouses, family members and friends who are grappling with accusations levelled against people they love. Lawyers and HR professionals who are thinking about the workplace issues and policies that need to be addressed. Activists and policy professionals who are concerned to convert the #MeToo moment into social, behavioral, and policy change.

That’s exactly why we need a shared vocabulary for having a this difficult conversation: not just a set of words to describe our experiences, but a set of concepts that help us understand how our words will affect the people reading them .

On this particular issue, we can get a lot of the ideas and language we need from feminist, queer, and anti-racist scholarship; since sexual harassment and assault are topics that have been subject to extensive study and discussion among feminist scholars, that’s where I’ve drawn the lion’s share of my resources. Although it’s been decades since my undergrad days as a Women’s Studies major, I’ve made some effort to stay in touch with evolving language and theory; this conceptual vocabulary is hugely useful when it comes to engaging in the current conversation around sexual assault and harassment. I’ve rounded up some of the most essential, and found JSTOR resources (as well as some more accessible blog posts) that explain each concept.

If you’re participating in the conversation around Me Too—or even just trying to make sense of it—these concepts and resources can help. This is by no means a comprehensive list; consider it a starting point, not an end point. Maybe you only have ten or fifteen minutes to read up on some of the ideas that feminists use to talk about these difficult subjects, in which case, I hope you’ll get what you need here.

But if any of my very cursory descriptions rankle, well, don’t assume I’ve done the idea justice: instead, take the time to dig deeper. You can read the JSTOR article I’ve linked to on that topic (I’ve made a point of choosing articles that are good reading in their own right); I’ve also hyperlinked each phrase to an even more accessible blog post explaining the concept.

Privilege is the idea that our social structure advantages some people and disadvantages others, in complicated ways. It’s an essential concept in the #MeToo conversation because it helps us recognize that we come to that conversation with very different experiences, stakes, and lenses—differences we may not always readily acknowledge.

Quoting the author of “ White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” (a piece I highly recommend reading!),  Vicky Greenbaum notes that “Peggy McIntosh has found in pioneering the work of curriculum change at the university level that ‘I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged …. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.’” (Greenbaum’s article contains a terrific list of novels from a range of backgrounds, if you’d like to broaden your perspective through fiction.)

Recognizing privilege doesn’t make it evaporate: as Sonia Kruks writes, “In some areas, including race, our privilege will not cease to exist however much we may become aware of and try to abandon our previous styles of personal behavior.” An awareness of privilege is an essential starting point for participating in a challenging conversation, and particularly, for thinking carefully about your relationship to that conversation.

Centering   is one expression of privilege: a tendency to place yourself, your experience or your social group at the centre of a conversation. In her article on anti-racist pedagogy , Priya Kandaswamy offers a useful example of what that looks like:

…in women’s studies classes, when discussing the experiences of women of color white students often either try to emphasize that they have had similar experiences to women of color or treat the experiences of women of color as separate from their own experiences and therefore as something about which they have nothing to say. Both of these positions allow white students to avoid questioning their white privilege by re-centering their own experience.

We see the very common impulse to place yourself at the center of the story in comments from men who place themselves in the conversation by saying they care because they have wives or daughters or sisters. (So…this matters because it might happen to a woman you care about?) Nicholas Kristof criticized this framing in an excellent New York Times column that showed how a man can participate in this conversation without centering himself.

Kandaswamy’s article about anti-racist pedagogy illustrates why it’s so often difficult to de-center oneself in a conversation: “White students often have the racialized expectation that their experience will be centered in the classroom. Therefore, when the perspectives of students of color are taken equally seriously, many white students express a sense that they are being victimized because of their race.” If you find yourself thinking the #MeToo conversation is sexist or victimizing men, read more about the idea of centering and decentering. If you find yourself crying over how terrible it all is,  read this .

Intersectionality

Intersectionality acknowledges that people have different identities and forms of privilege that intersect: a poor man of color can have male privilege without race or class privilege. In “ Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender ,” Ann Garry summarizes the concept of intersectionality as follows:

Oppression and privilege by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, nationality, and so on do not act independently of each other in our individual lives or in our social structures; instead, each kind of oppression or privilege is shaped by and works through the others. These compounded, intermeshed systems of oppression and privilege in our social structures help to produce (a) our social relations, (b) our experiences of our own identity, and (c) the limitations of shared interests even among members of “the same” oppressed or privileged group.

This is an essential idea to wrap your mind around if you’re going to engage in the conversation around #MeToo, as I was reminded on the very first day the conversation got underway. I expressed a little exhaustion with the idea that we needed evidence that sexual harassment is widespread; surely we all knew that? Someone quickly reminded me that sexual harassment and violence aren’t spoken about as freely in every family, culture, and context as they were in the white, middle-class, explicitly feminist family I grew up in.

That’s intersectionality in action: noticing that race, class, sexuality, and other identities intersect with gender and sexual violence; noticing that trans and non binary people are at exceptionally high risk; learning about the different ways sexual violence and harassment affect people of different ethnicities and classes. It’s complicated, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend this issue works the same way in all contexts.

Rape Culture

Rape culture is a term (coined by Susan Griffin in 1971) that helps us see sexual violence, sexual harassment, and everyday sexism as cultural phenomena that exist on a continuum. Larry May and Robert Strikwerda explain the idea of rape culture in their very thoughtful exploration of different ways to understand male responsibility for rape: “Misbehavior, especially sexual misbehavior of males toward females is, however mixed the messages, something that many men condone. This has given rise to the use of the term ‘the rape culture’ to describe the climate of attitudes that exists in the contemporary American male-dominated world.”

The concept of rape culture acknowledges that we live in a culture that immerses us all in messages that promote the violation of women’s bodies; recognizing rape as a culture-wide problem, and not just an individual character issue, is an essential precursor to actually stopping it. As May and Strikwerda put it, “while we believe that men should feel some shame for their group’s complicity in the prevalence of rape, our aim is not to shame men but rather to stimulate men to take responsibility for re-socializing themselves and their fellow men.”

Toxic Masculinity

Toxic masculinity   or hegemonic masculinity are two versions of the idea that our society’s definition of manhood is inseparable from the oppression of women. It’s an important concept to understand in the conversation around #MeToo, because it’s the lens through which some people look at the problems of sexual harassment and assault: as byproducts of hegemonic masculinity. In “ On Patriarchs and Losers: Rethinking Men’s Interests ,” Michael A. Messner sums up its key dimensions:

 The fact that it is nearly impossible for an individual man consistently to achieve and display the dominant conception of masculinity is an important part of the psychological instability at the center of individual men’s sense of their own masculinity. Instead, a few men (real or imagined) are positioned as symbolic exemplars for a hegemonic masculinity that serves as a collective practice that continues the global subordination of women, and ensures men’s access to a patriarchal dividend. What makes this masculinity ‘hegemonic’ is not simply powerful men’s displays of power, but also, crucially, less powerful men’s consent and complicity with the institutions, social practices, and symbols that privilege men. To adapt a term that is now popular in market-driven bureaucracies, hegemonic masculinity requires a “buy-in” by subordinated and marginalized men, if it is to succeed as a strategy of domination.

Victim Blaming

Victim blaming is a facet of rape culture: a range of direct and subtle ways in which the victims of sexual violence and harassment are blamed for their experiences. In their assessment of a survey tool that is used to assess attitudes towards sexual violence on college campuses,  Sarah McMahon and G. Lawrence Farmer write:

It can be argued that as overt sexism in general has declined, those rape myths that blatantly blame girls and women for rape have become less acceptable. However, many of the underlying beliefs that the girls and women did something to contribute to the assault and that it is not completely the perpetrator’s fault still exist but in more covert expressions. For example, in a study conducted with college student-athletes, McMahon (2005) found that respondents would not directly blame the victim for her assault but expressed the belief that women put themselves in bad situations by dressing a certain way, drinking alcohol, or demonstrating other behaviours such as flirting.

Victim blaming isn’t just unfair; it keeps us from changing power structures in a way that could actually affect the incidence of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Amber E. Kinser’s “ Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism”  is a very readable and informative perspective on recent feminist thinking (usefully grounded in a brief review of feminist history). In it, Kinser observes the importance of “women…recognizing when they in fact have been victimized so that they can then stop self-blaming and begin the personal and political work that can help them reclaim their power.” That can’t happen as long as we’re busy blaming victims.

Silencing is the behavior of shouting down or shaming unwelcome comments or voices—or simply signalling, in a million subtle ways, that a certain perspective or voice or set of of voices is unwelcome. The influential black feminist writer bell hooks writes eloquently about her experience of silencing in the response to her first book:

I was not expecting a critical level avalanche that had the power in its intensity to crush spirit, to push one into silence. Since that time I have heard stories about black women, about women of color, who write and publish, having nervous breakdowns (even when the work is quite successful), being made mad because they cannot bear the harsh responses of family, friends, and unknown critics, or becoming silent, unproductive…To those who wield oppressive power that which is threatening must necessarily be wiped out, annihilated, silenced.

In the outpouring of conversation around #MeToo we have seen voices that will not be silenced. And yet, when people jump into the fray without taking a minute to listen, read and learn, we can feel the edges of the silence starting to wash up around this important but fragile conversation. Even well-intentioned contributions can be silencing when they drift into victim blaming; when they de-center assault survivors and instead center the husbands or father of potential victims; when they erase the identities and experiences of different men and women by refusing to wrestle with the complexity of intersectionality.

If it seems like a lot of work to learn about all these different words and ideas, just so that you can avoid silencing or hurting people—well, it is. But if you’re actually trying to be an ally to the women, men, and non-binary people who are victims of sexual harassment and violence, it’s very necessary work indeed.

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Tips for talking to students about sexual assault

Sexual assault disproportionately impacts young adults and can have a major impact on students at CU. Families play an important role in helping students navigate healthy relationships and providing support. 

Here are a few things everyone should know about sexual assault and tips for starting a conversation with your student.

Things to know about sexual assault

Sexual assault can happen to anyone.

The reality is that the majority of sexual assaults are carried out by people students know: friends, acquaintances, classmates, co-workers, partners, exes, neighbors or someone a student may have met online or at a party. This often contradicts what we believe and can make it more difficult to recognize the problem.

It can be helpful to go beyond ‘stranger danger’ and help your student think about social events like parties and residential spaces that may also create risk. Consider your approach and avoid sharing things that put the burden on victims to prevent sexual assault or blame them for having been assaulted. It’s important to know that sexual assault can happen to anyone, regardless of age, race, gender identity or sexual orientation. However, it disproportionately affects women, bisexual and transgender people and young adults.

Consent is key

People often think that consent is something that you "get" or "give" in a sexual situation. Consent is more of an agreement that people arrive at together. Consent can include words or actions (non-verbals and body language) that create mutual understanding, clear willingness and acceptance of the conditions of any sexual activity.

Consent must be established before people engage in any sexual activity. This gives students the opportunity to set personal boundaries and limits and understand the boundaries of others. Keep in mind that consent is ongoing, and people can change their minds and withdraw consent at any time during sexual activities. It’s important to talk to your student about how to stay tuned in to a partner’s experience.

It’s also important to know that anyone who is incapacitated by alcohol, drugs or anything else cannot give consent, regardless of what they are saying or doing. Incapacitation is a state where someone can not make a reasonable, rational decision because they lack the capacity to understand the “who, what, where, when or why” of a sexual interaction.

Learn more about consent

Sexual assault can include a wide range of experiences

Sexual assault includes any unwanted sexual contact or behaviors that a person did not or was not able to consent to. 

Sexual assault can include, but is not limited to, the following:

• Unwanted penetration or contact, including vaginal, anal or oral sex (this includes penetration by an object or another person’s body part)
• Unwanted touching of private body parts (e.g. butt, breasts, genitals) 

Keep in mind that sexual assault can also include attempted assault using any of the methods listed above. Additional forms of sexual misconduct include sexual harassment, exploitation (e.g. sharing nudes, videotaping sexual acts without consent, etc.) as well as intimate partner abuse such as dating violence and stalking.

Learn more about sexual misconduct at CU Boulder

Tips for talking to your student

While sexual assault can be a difficult subject to broach, having conversations can help your student identify problematic situations, support their friends and navigate relationships in a healthy way. Here are some tips to help you talk with your student about sexual assault and other forms of sexual misconduct.

  Weave it into routine conversations.

Look for opportunities to discuss sex, gender scripts, dating and healthy communication as part of your everyday interactions. For instance, when checking in with your student, it’s okay to be curious about their new friends and relationships. If they open up, encourage them to explore their own beliefs and values about what they want from potential partners and their dating experiences.

  Explore red flags together.

Encourage your student to think through red flags for sexual assault and abuse in a relationship. Red flags can include someone committing boundary violations, not listening to others, being persistent about pursuing someone sexually, hitting on the drunkest person at a party or trying to get someone alone or away from their friends at a party. Remind your student that most people understand boundaries and consent, but some people aren’t interested in honoring them.

Learn more about drug-facilitated sexual assault

  Encourage your student to look out for friends.

If something feels weird or wrong, it probably is. If your student sees a situation where someone seems uncomfortable or unsafe, encourage them to find a way to check on that person or get them out of the situation. Remind your student that it’s okay to make up an excuse to interject or disrupt an uncomfortable or problematic situation. Bystanders are particularly important in situations where someone is being pursued sexually  because of their level of intoxication, or if a person has been intentionally drugged in an attempt to facilitate sexual assault. Remind your student that impaired or incapacitated people are usually unable to protect or advocate for themselves in these situations. Learn more about bystander strategies that students can use to interrupt problematic situations.

  Practice effective bystander skills.

Encourage your student to practice effective bystander skills to disrupt potentially sketchy situations. Bystanders are particularly important in situations where someone is being targeted by a perpetrator because of their level of intoxication, or if a person has been intentionally drugged in an attempt to facilitate sexual assault. Remind your student that impaired or incapacitated people are usually unable to protect or advocate for themselves in these situations. Learn more about bystander strategies that students can use to interrupt problematic situations.

  Share support resources.

Resources are available for students who have experienced sexual assault, who want to support friends and survivors or who to learn more about sexual assault prevention. Students often go to friends first if something bad happens, and they may reach out to family members as well. Having the skills to respond effectively without blame or judgment is important to keep in mind. Learn more skills for supporting students in the aftermath of a traumatic event .

Here are some additional ways you can connect students with support services:

Office of Victim Assistance (OVA)

OVA provides free and confidential information, consultation, support, advocacy and short-term, trauma-focused counseling services for students, grad students, faculty and staff who have experienced a traumatic, disturbing or life-disruptive event, including sexual assault and harassment. 

Confidential resource

Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC)

OIEC implements and enforces university policies around sexual assault, intimate partner abuse and stalking, and other forms of sexual misconduct. If you or someone you know at CU has been impacted, reports can be filed online. Anonymous reporting is an option as well. 

Don't Ignore It

Explore your options for seeking confidential support, reporting concerns and learning skills for helping others. If something seems off, it probably is—don't ignore it. 

Mandatory reporting policy

All university employees who have the authority to hire, promote, discipline, evaluate, grade, formally advise or direct faculty, staff or students are considered "responsible employees" and are required to report alleged misconduct to the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC). This includes resident advisors, teaching assistants, professors, graduate instructors, academic advisors, coaches or other university employees with oversight authority. 

Any sexual misconduct, intimate partner abuse (including dating and domestic violence), stalking, protected-class discrimination or harassment, or related retaliation disclosed to a responsible employee must be reported to OIEC. The person impacted has the choice about whether and how they want to proceed. Reporting is required to help ensure that people understand their rights and options and the resources available. 

  Note: Confidential campus resources are exempt from CU Boulder’s mandatory reporting policy, including the Office of Victim Assistance (OVA), Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS), Faculty and Staff Assistance Program (FSAP) and Ombuds.

Learn more about mandatory reporting

Additional reading

Health and Wellness Services is committed to providing families with relevant information and tips to help you best support your students. Check out more family articles online.

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Sexual Assault Awareness Month

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The NSVRC has gathered a large collection of online resources for the purpose of assisting survivor advocates and prevention educators in their work. These resources are organized by the topics listed above. You may also use the search bar to help you find the resources you are looking for. Click here to see our definitions for each resource topic.

Title IX and Sexual Violence in Schools

Fact Sheet: Title IX and Sexual Assault >>

Sexual violence in schools and on campus is a pressing civil rights issue: when students suffer sexual assault and harassment, they are deprived of equal and free access to an education.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal funding. Title IX is a powerful tool for students who want to combat sexual violence at school and on college campuses. Under Title IX, discrimination on the basis of sex can include sexual harassment, rape, and sexual assault.

TITLE IX STATES: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

The Women’s Rights Project, in collaboration with Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER) — a national nonprofit that empowers students to hold colleges accountable for sexual assault in their communities — has put together the fact sheet , podcast series , and other resources on this page to get the word out to student activists about how they can use Title IX as an effective tool for change.

RESOURCES > Gender-Based Violence & Harassment: Your School, Your Rights

Under the requirements of Title IX schools receiving federal funds have a legal obligation to protect students from gender-based violence and harassment – including sexual assault. Use this to find out more about schools’ obligations under Title IX and students’ rights.

> Fact Sheet: Title IX and Sexual Assault: Know Your Rights and Your College’s Responsibilities

The Women’s Rights Project has participated in a number of court cases in which courts have taken important steps to hold schools accountable for ignoring sexual harassment or sexual assault that they knew about in school or on campus.

> J.K. v. Arizona Board of Regents (02/26/2008) A federal court rejected Arizona State University’s (ASU) argument that it was not responsible under Title IX when a campus athlete raped a student, even though it had previously expelled the athelte for severe sexual harassment of multiple other women on campus. The case settled and ASU agreed to appoint a statewide Student Safety Coordinator who will review and reform policies for reporting and investigating incidents of sexual harassment and assault, and award the plaintiff $850,000 in damages and fees.

> Simpson v. University of Colorado (08/24/2006) A federal court found that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that the University of Colorado (CU) acted with “deliberate indifference” with regard to students Lisa Simpson and Anne Gilmore, who were sexually assaulted by CU football players and recruits. The University settled the case and agreed to hire a new counselor for the Office of Victim’s Assistance, appoint an independent Title IX advisor, and pay $2.5 million in damages.

> Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee (08/29/2008) The United States Supreme Court held that public school students may challenge sex discrimination under both Title IX and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

> Blog: Students Mobilize for Change During Sexual Assault Awareness Month (4/1/2009) Schools and colleges around the country are waking up to the power of Title IX to combat sexual violence on campus. School administrators can’t afford to ignore Title IX.

> Huffington Post: Ariela Migdal: Take Back Our Campuses (4/3/2008) April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and students across the country are protesting sexual assault on campus by holding Take Back the Night rallies.

> License to Thrive: 35 Years of Title IX (off-site) “There have been reforms and efforts to improve the climate for study for women in colleges and graduate programs through mechanisms like Title IX enforcement around sexual harassment issues. However, there is a lot of blockage in the system when it comes to women fulfilling their dreams. There are very high rates of sexual harassment reported by female students in colleges and universities and graduate programs as well as in elementary and secondary education.” —Gwendolyn Mink, Professor at Smith College and daughter of former U.S. Representative Patsy Mink (co-author of Title IX legislation) For more information about the history of Title IX, go to licensetothrive.org

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Sexual Assault and Campus Housing: Know Your Rights

Related documents, the right to safe housing on college campuses for survivors of sexual assault, stalking, domestic violence, and dating violence, stay informed.

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Sexual Abuse

3 ways to take action to end sexual assault, together, we can turn awareness of sexual assault into action..

Posted March 30, 2022 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

• Sexual assault is common. Awareness of the scope of the problem alone will not be enough to stop it.
• Taking action can feel daunting when faced with a problem as persistent as sexual assault.
• We share an interest in acting together, from communicating facts about sexual assault to advocating for prevention programming.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month. August ushers in college orientations and sexual assault prevention programming. These cyclical events bring bursts of attention to sexual violence in its many forms.

Increasing attention to and awareness of the scope of the problem of sexual assault is important for many reasons. For instance, talking openly about sexual assault can combat the alienation that is common after intimate violence by showing survivors that they are not alone.

Yet awareness alone is not enough to turn the tide of sexual victimization that affects people of all genders in the U.S. and around the world . Instead, we have to find ways to move from awareness to action.

Unfortunately, taking action can feel daunting when faced with a problem as persistent as sexual assault. After all, sexual assault has been common across history – often treated as something taboo to talk about and someone else’s problem to solve.

After years of studying sexual assault and other forms of intimate violence, I’ve learned that it affects all of us, whether directly or indirectly through impacts on our education , healthcare, and legal systems. This means we share an interest in taking action.

As Sexual Assault Awareness Month comes around again, here are three things that you can do to move from awareness to action.

1. Learn about sexual assault and share your learning with others.

Myths about sexual assault are common and harmful . Fortunately, online resources make it easy to get facts about sexual assault – from how prevalent it is in our communities to common consequences affecting survivors and more . You can start learning more about sexual assault and its impacts today. As you do, take action to share what you’re learning with others. When you share your learning, you accomplish several things at once. For example, you combat persistent myths to help educate people about the realities of sexual assault. At the same time, you practice talking about sexual assault so that doing so gets easier as you shed taboos against speaking about this intimate form of violence.

2. Identify people and organizations working to prevent and respond to sexual assault in your community and connect with them.

Find out who is doing sexual assault prevention and response work in your local community -- perhaps through a rape crisis center or a family justice center . Check out who is organizing to address sexual assault through legislative efforts. Learn about the work that your state coalition against sexual assault is doing. Reach out to these agencies to explore how you can connect to their networks to take collaborative action that fits your interests, skills, and passions. Along the way, you might also identify gaps in resources – say your community doesn’t have any prevention work – that you can work towards filling with others in your community’s networks.

3. Advocate for youth prevention programs.

Preventing sexual assault and other intimate violence requires equipping young people with tools for healthy relationships – from learning about consent and healthy sexuality to how to intervene to stop sexual assault. Thanks to decades of research, several empirically supported approaches to preventing sexual assault are available. After learning if your community offers any of these programs, perhaps through local schools or faith organizations, you can advocate to start or expand programming. You can encourage elected officials to support prevention programming to end sexual assault in your community.

Keep exploring

Of course, these actions are just a starting place. April is a great time to explore other avenues for action as local and national organizations invite people to take part in Sexual Assault Awareness Month activities . For more ideas related to our shared interest in taking action to end sexual assault and intimate violence long after April, check out upcoming posts on this blog and my new book, Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women . Together, we can work towards a world without intimate violence.

Anne P. DePrince, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and distinguished university professor at the University of Denver. She is an expert in trauma and violence against women and children.

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Sexual Assault - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Sexual Assault is a grave societal issue, often underreported, involving non-consensual sexual contact or activity. Essays on sexual assault could explore the prevalence, causes, and consequences of sexual assault, as well as societal responses, legal frameworks, and support systems for survivors. Discussions might also delve into the portrayal of sexual assault in media and literature, the challenges of advocacy and social change in confronting sexual assault, and the intersectionality of sexual assault with issues like gender, power dynamics, and social norms. Moreover, analyzing case studies, survivor testimonies, and the evolving discourse on consent and sexual violence can provide a comprehensive exploration of sexual assault and the ongoing efforts to combat it. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Sexual Assault you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Why does the Number of Sexual Assaults Continue to Increase Throughout the Army?

The word SHARP is getting more popular in the media every year. Due to the high increase cases in the army. During the past years the statistics are significantly changing. Based on the “Department of the Defense annual report on sexual assault on the military 2017 fiscal year”. Have significant changes on the statistics, on this last fiscal year was an increment on the reports for 597 more reports than fiscal year 2016. The sexual assault is going to keep […]

Effort to Improve Handling and Training on Sexual Assault in Army

More soldiers are presenting themselves in the army for help and reporting on sexual harassment and assaults after the army increased its efforts to train and handle these issues. It is said that the number of sexual assaults being reported is rising.  This could be attributed to the strong resolve of the army to get do away with the sexual assault problem. The confidence of the soldiers in fighting this problem is increasing both in their units and in the […]

Army: Sexual Harassment

Since 2008, the Army has implemented the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program to ""prevent incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault before they occur."" SHARP is one of the most important programs in the Army. Not only is it a tool for training and education, it aids countless victims in reporting incidents of sexual harassment and assault. It has come a long way in two decades, with its origins in SAPR and POSH. SHARP holds command teams accountable for […]

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Political Rape and Sexual Assault Victims

For many years women have been viewed as less than a human being. She is treated in such a way that she does not have a place in the society. Her rights are robbed off by the superiors who are the men. Cases of rape and sexual assault are now, more than ever, at an alarming state in the United States of America. According to statistics from the Justice Department, a rape or sexual assault case is reported every five […]

Practices to Reduce Sexual Assault in Army

Every 98 seconds, another American is sexually assaulted. It is a plague on our society and within our military. The Department of Defense is constantly revising and implementing new ideas and plans to intervene and prevent sexual assault from occurring. It is vital to keep soldiers informed and knowledgeable about sexual assault awareness throughout their career so as to have an effective and strong team to ensure safety within our nations fighting force. There is no one specific reason that […]

The Unacceptable Normalization of Sexual Violence and its Counterparts

17 Apr. 2019 “In the U.S., one in three women and one in six men experienced some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime” (Get Statistics). Sexual violence is a prevalent part of living in our world today, however disappointing that may be. Its commonness has given way for it to become a regular inclusion in modern media, though often times this inclusion is found in a skewed report. This problem is caused primarily through the allowance of uninformed […]

Sexual Assault in the Military and how Fix it

Bystanders intervention can play a massive roll in deterring sexual assault / harassment within the Army. With battle buddies watching out for one while they party in the barracks with a direct approach. Talking to the chain of command about what you witness and let them handle the situation to the best of their ability. If you feel like these would not be the solution to the problem, Soldiers can always talk to the SHARP representative. With these easy steps, […]

Bystander Intervention to Battle Sexual Assault/harassment in your Unit/10th Mountain Division/Army

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING BECAUSE IT’S ON US. Bystander intervention is a strategy for the prevention of different types of violence, including sexual harassment and sexual assault. The fact that people will see something but not say anything based off of a reaction they get from others. Bystander intervention can battle sexual assault by increasing the awareness of all soldiers army wide and by encouraging them and showing them ways to interfere with sexual assault. It could also […]

What is the Importance of Professionalism?

What is the importance of professionalism? The first question we should be asking is, what is professionalism? Professionalism is most commonly described as acting like a professional. A professional is defined “ characterized by or or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession. So to be a professional you must act professional. This is applied in almost every job anywhere. According to the APS ( the Association for Psychological Science) it takes only 60 seconds for someone […]

How Current Military Approach Reduces the Risk of Sexual Assault

Fight or Flight? It is flight, fight, or freeze in crisis mode. The freeze response is a typical reaction to danger, particularly common among sexual assault survivors. Sexual assault is a form of violence and is fundamentally about power and control. It happens because perpetrators exert power over the survivor and put their desires over the survivor’s agency to consent. In this essay I will analyze why sexual assault occurs, how current military approach reduces the risk of such crimes, […]

Sexual Assault and Memory Effects

Introduction Majority of people would agree that sexual assault is bad, but in what ways? We know that it can be very damaging to the individual who has experienced such a traumatic event and in some cases it can be life altering. This literature review explores the different possible ways in which experiencing sexual assault could affect memory. Some research shows that it is more damaging to the self-concept, like self-esteem rather than have an effect on memory. There has […]

Sexual Harassment and Assault Response Program SHARP

In our Army today we are continuously talking to our soldiers both old and new about the infamous SHARP (Sexual Harassment / Assault Response Program). The question now comes down to why? Why are we always conducting the same training every quarter, every year in every unit, duty station, location, and MOS? The Army has had this program implemented throughout its ranks. I would say it’s because they have become tired of seeing “America’s Greatest Fighting Force” negatively affected and […]

The Rise of Sexual Assault in the Military

Sexual assault is a prevalent and growing problem in the military. According to the DOD annual report, 14,900 military members were sexually assaulted in 2016 (8,600 women and 6,300 men) and in 2018 that number rose to 20,500. This number represents only the reported sexual assaults and it is estimated that 81% of victims did not report an assault. The reasons for underreporting are numerous but include mistrust in the military judicial system, mistrust of leadership and fear of retaliation. […]

Sexual Assault: is it Becoming an Addition to the College Lifestyle?

It is labeled as the best four years of anyone who is granted the opportunity to attend any university. It is a time where an individual can decide who they are and what they want to become. While this is an accurate piece of information, it also raises the question, does college promote a rape culture that is seen in society today? Often with sites, such as I’m Shmacked and others, who posts videos of college drinking, presumably of underage […]

The Effect of Sexual Assault in a Diverse World

This research paper magnifies sexual assault in a perspective that defines the heterogeneous classification of individuals that are preyed upon. In congruence, this dissertation enumerates to what degree of the following methodologies play in becoming a victim of sexual assault: psychoanalytic, household malfunction, psychological, the feminist approach, and the multi-factor model. Furthermore, the Texas Penal Code (Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 22.011 and Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 22.021) will be assessed and examined. More importantly, the rights of sexual […]

Support after Sexual Assault

The purpose of the paper is to explore the different treatment interventions for victims of sexual assault. Sexual violence is a pervasive issue that millions of individuals face. It is associated with changes in an individual’s cognition as well as their behavior. As such, this paper will examine how these interventions are conducted as well as the efficacy of its implementation. It will also examine its relation to societal views and the impact it has on symptomology. Through a literature […]

Rape Culture what does not Kill Us Makes Us Stronger

Rape culture, what is it? In the minds of most people, it is typically associated with feminism and social media movements. However, by definition, it is a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse. Rape culture in our society is so socially normal that we do not know what it really is, we just associate it with normal things that we can just ignore or “brush off our shoulders” […]

Example of a Sexual Assault Case

Sexual assault and rape are very serious social and public health issues in the U.S. Everyday there are women who are the victims of sexual assault and rape while men more or less are always the perpetrators. As an example in the article “Ford-Kavanaugh Hearing” by Ezra Klein it addresses the relationship between Christine Blasey and Brett Kavanaugh and the sexual assault hearings. On September 27th, 2018 Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of the Senate […]

Sexual Assault is a Need or a Crime

“With those short shorts, she was totally asking for it.” “She was drinking. It’s not his fault that he has needs!” “It was only a few minutes. I didn’t even finish!” This is the culture we live in: the culture where it is perceived to be acceptable for a college student to rape an unconscious girl. This culture is one that should be simply unacceptable in the twenty-first century. Rape is deemed acceptable in this culture, but we cannot allow […]

What Causes Sexual Assault

There are certain challenges in protecting oneself from sexual assault across the board though there are precautions to be taken and good common sense to be practiced. A challenge lies in profiling perpetrators because sex offenders differ in all characteristics such as age, background, personality, race, religion, and more. Even the crimes they commit vary in time, place, gender, age of the victim, the planning of the offense or lack thereof, and the amount of violence exacted making it nearly […]

Sexual Assault Response Program

Sexual assault and harassment are an issue that has been going on for much too long. The worst part is that the amount of reports is increasing in our military today, between our own brothers and sisters in arms. It is hard to understand that us as humans who are advancing in technology and resolving so many issues throughout intensive study, still can not prevent or in this case even decrease criminal human behavior. We go through life thinking that […]

Sexual Harassment Victims Silenced

I found multiple instances of blatant plagiarism. For that reason alone your paper fails and you fail the class. Your violation of the Student Code of Conduct will be reported to the Dean of Students. There is not grade appeal for blatant plagiarism. Unfortunately sexual violence is so common. “In the United States, one in three women has experienced some type of sexual violence. (WomensHealth)” According to the EEOC, sexual violence is “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and […]

Sexual Assault Survivors

Sexual assault on college campuses is and has been on the rise for quite some time now. For decades, it has even been said to be the most common crime found within the discussion of college campuses today. As many people may have seen, recently the hashtag “MeToo” has ignited a movement, allowing sexual assault survivors to share their stories and to spread awareness about the issue, almost entirely across all social media platforms. Thousands of sexual assault survivors spanning […]

How President Trump S Supreme Court Pick Got Confirmed with Sexual Assault Allegations

Abstract This essay explores the sexual assault allegations of Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh from Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford in their United States Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. There will be a brief explanation of the event. The use of sociological perspectives will also be used to help explain Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation and the overt disinterest for Dr. Ford's testimony. How President Trump's Supreme Court Pick Got Confirmed with Sexual Assault Allegations Testifying in front of the Senate was designated to get […]

Alcohol Abuse is a Problem : Rural Term Paper

Alcohol abuse is a problem that is very consistent among individuals who are usually charged or convicted by the criminal justice system for violating the laws, yet there have been limited efforts to survey the effectiveness of diversionary programs for offenders whose crime is related to alcohol use. The criminal justice system has seen an increase in the rates of alcohol-related offenses particularly with the current trends in alcohol use among college students (Dale, 2007). This policy paper will review […]

Essay about Media Law

For years, women have been degraded, objectified, and misrepresented through advertisements, magazines, and other media messages. Women are portrayed as sexual objects, cliche stereotypes such as a “housewife”, and are altered by photo proliferation softwares to resemble the “Barbie doll” image. During a class discussion in my creative strategy class, my professor displayed an advertisement that angered me to my core. The ad was for a men’s shoe company called RedTape and the image displayed four women posing sexually inside […]

The Army’s Sharp Program is the Army’s Campaign

Sexual violence festers within the military. Both men and women fall victim to sexual assault and harassment every day within the ranks of the military. The Army’s SHARP program is the Army’s campaign to put an end to sexual assault and sexual harassment within its own ranks. But a large problem that has been plaguing the military has been the lack of victims coming forward to report their assaults. The number of sexual assaults in the military is not increasing, […]

Treatment Groups for Domestic Violence Survivors

Abstract Roughly 1.8 million women yearly in the U. S experience some sort of serious violent behavior in the home (Straus & Gelles, 1990). Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a type of trauma that can result in huge emotional well-being concern for people who are exploited. Rates of clinical melancholy and posttraumatic stress issues are higher among the mishandled versus non-manhandled women, especially if exploited everyone would have encountered other lifetime trauma. While there are various intercessions intended to diminish […]

Disassembling Rape Culture in College Athletics

Hundreds of sexual assault reports on campuses involving student athletes go un-noticed and un-discussed due to their participation in the university’s sports team. We read stories in the news constantly about students at high-profile athletic schools getting accused or found guilty of rape or assault, and still being allowed to participate in sporting events. For good or bad, big-time sports are the public face of hundreds of colleges across the country, and the 18-23 year-old students participating in these sports […]

Rape Culture: when Society Normalizes Sexual Violence

Mainly pertaining to women, “the way she dressed, she was asking for it” or we have all heard it before, “boys will be boys”. Today men and women just assume sexual assault is inevitable. Rape culture also pertains to the jokes made on wide range of media such as music and tv shows/movies, anything that normalizes violence against women. A lot of people think that’s just the way things are, but from my perception we were taught it from a […]

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It's Been 37 Years Since My Rape. The Shame Still Haunts Me

Editors note : The author of this essay is a 52-year-old Massachusetts woman. We've granted her request for anonymity because of the personal and painful nature of its content. We also believe her desire to remain anonymous, nearly 40 years after she was assaulted, says something powerful about the effect this experience has had on her life.

In March 2013, I published an  anonymous essay  about being sexually assaulted by five male classmates in 1981 when we were 15 years old. I was moved to write that essay because I was so angry about the way a teenage sexual assault victim from Steubenville, Ohio was being publicly vilified for drinking alcohol and passing out, which a group of boys then viciously took advantage of. The incident, including the victim’s clear incapacity, had been captured on video, which was probably the only reason the two rapists were held to account. My heart broke for the teenager who was being doubly victimized. First, she was sexually violated. Then, she was blamed in the  national media for somehow “allowing” or even “encouraging” the rape to happen.

As sickened as I was by the incident, I only agreed to publish that article with the understanding that my identity would be kept private. I didn’t want my teenage sons to know what had happened to me. I didn’t want my current circle of friends to know about that part of my past.

I still don’t want my identity revealed. Even now, as women across the country step forward to share their #MeToo stories. And even as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick bring allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Keeping a “secret” is part of what is so damaging about sexual assault. It festers inside of you, allowing the shame to grow.

I don’t want to spend emotional energy discussing and reliving that awful part of my life with each friend or loved one who reads this essay. I also don’t want to risk the professional reputation I’ve worked years to build on the off-chance that someone I know — or who finds me on the internet — decides to harass me. I particularly fear harassment or humiliation aimed at my boys or my husband.

It’s true that almost 40 years after that incident and its aftermath, I still feel shame. It embarrasses me to discuss, or even to think about, the degrading details of my assault:

How I was new to town; how a popular boy I vaguely knew, “John,” called to see if he and four friends could come over to my house one Saturday night when my parents weren’t home; how we watched TV for a while with my younger brother before going into the living room to talk; how one boy asked if they could see what my bedroom looked like; how we talked in my room for a few minutes until John said, “one, two, three” and they all jumped on top of me and started tearing off my clothes; how I struggled and yelled to John to get everyone off me; how he said he would — as long as I would let each boy have a turn; how I agreed — I didn't know what else to do; how before that night, I had only kissed one boy, after he had been my boyfriend for several months; how I arrived at school the next Monday to everyone laughing at me and calling me a slut; how I had to endure three more years at that high school before applying to a college across the country and never looking back.

As a 15-year-old, I was confused, overwhelmed, devastated, alone. The adults in my life didn’t ask what had happened after my behavior markedly changed or ask how they could help, maybe thinking it was just normal teenage angst. I was naïve in not knowing how to ask them for the help I so desperately needed.

Keeping a “secret” is part of what is so damaging about sexual assault. It festers inside of you, allowing the shame to grow. Since you don’t have anyone else to act as a sounding board, you’re at the mercy of your own crazy repeating thoughts — replaying the incident over and over, wishing you had done some little thing differently in the hope that the assault could have been avoided. Additionally, you will do almost anything to make sure the secret won’t be revealed, which can make the initial situation even more damaging. You engage in self-destructive behaviors to blot the pain or to subconsciously punish yourself. Your self-esteem plummets. You think you are unlovable, dirty and bad.

I didn’t even know the concept of “rape” before it happened to me, so how was I supposed to know these seemingly cool boys were plotting something so evil?

Eventually, through therapy, I was able to understand that my behavior didn’t cause the assault — John’s did. Sure, I let them come over to my house when my parents weren’t home, because I was excited to hang out with boys who apparently wanted to spend time getting to know me. No alarm bells went off when one of them asked to see my bedroom. I had neat things in my room to look at, and the white desk where I studied was there, so I didn’t think of it as just the place where my bed was. I didn’t even know the concept of “rape” before it happened to me, so how was I supposed to know these seemingly cool boys were plotting something so evil? My fervent hope is that the #MeToo movement has educated potential victims so they will be more psychologically prepared to thwart an attack than I was.

No alcohol was involved when I was raped, though women are often blamed for their assaults if they have been drinking ( our president said so just this week): as if there is an equivalency between voluntarily drinking alcohol and being sexually violated against your will. I don’t understand why this only happens to rape victims. For instance, in 2017 several male college students tragically died after being hazed by their prospective fraternities . No one blamed those victims for drinking too much alcohol or for putting themselves in a situation where others could easily take advantage of them. The blame rested squarely where it should have: on the aggressors.

I marvel at the strength of Blasey Ford, Ramirez and Swetnick, for coming forward — in front of the entire world — to describe the degradation and violence they say they suffered 35 years ago. They know, like me and so many other victims, that they will be blamed for the disgusting, criminal behavior they were subjected to. They will also be blamed for ruining Kavanaugh’s career (or at least his character) as if his alleged deeds themselves weren’t the disqualifying factor.

Regardless of Kavanaugh’s fate, their bravery moves us another step up the ladder towards a fuller understanding of why we must #BelieveSurvivors. I thank them for that.

• Also by this author: My Own Personal Steubenville: Reflections On My High School Rape
• Janna Malamud Smith: I Stand With Christine Blasey Ford. Do You?
• Susan E. Gallagher: Kavanaugh’s Fate Isn’t The Only Thing At Stake

More from WBUR

I Quit My Job to Advocate for Sexual Assault Survivors

M ajoring in American Studies and Drama doesn’t do much in the way of preparing you to choose a job after college . I settled on what made sense, and that was to aim for a job in the advertising industry. It was accepted in our house: I come from a family of engineers, accountants and doctors, and my academic interests didn’t make sense to them, but a career in advertising did. It felt good to be on a track that everyone was on board with.

Then, at the beginning of my junior year, I was studying abroad in Dublin when I was sexually assaulted by another person in the program.

I was in another country and didn’t know how the laws worked, didn’t know who to tell. I was afraid of the general fallout, and I didn’t do anything about it until I was back in the U.S. When I returned, I went to therapy, but trauma is a hard thing to solve, especially when you’ve spent so much time not talking about it. So I turned to theater writing. I was about to start my senior year and begin work on my thesis, and I kept thinking, “What if I looked at sexual assault in an academic setting?” It wasn’t something I knew much about, but I thought I could use theater as an educational tool to connect people emotionally to the issue.

Unfortunately, writing a one-person show became isolating for me as I revisited traumatic memories over and over again. I ended up getting depressed and thought of hurting myself.

So I restarted, this time writing the show to include three characters. This brought in other women and allowed us to address more issues and perspectives, making the play truly educational. Our show created a special community of women supporting each other, a network of people who were there for each other and who were working on making an impact together. The end result of the project was not only a production that I was really proud of, but it was also a healthy way for me to move past the assault.

Now I wanted to do more: to speak out louder on the topic, help build stronger support systems, work personally with other survivors . I had a decision to make, and time was short. It was the end of April when the show wrapped, and I was graduating in mid-May. I always thought I wanted be in New York, and I had interned at an advertising agency there the previous summer. Suddenly, there was this other thing I really cared about — but could it be a career? Professionally, I didn’t know what pursuing sexual assault advocacy looked like. Emotionally, did I want to do that to myself? I had already been in a really dark place in dealing with the subject, and I didn’t want to be depressed, or upset, or put pressure on myself. And I questioned my abilities: how good could I be at helping others with something that I couldn’t handle on my own? So I stayed the course for advertising in New York, with an aim toward finding a balance: I’d take the advertising job and volunteer with sexual assault victims on the side.

Adult life began, and I set out to volunteer as a rape crisis counselor through a hospital program that trains volunteers to help survivors of sexual assault when they come to the emergency room. We would guide people through what was happening, but we were mostly there to be a friend for the victims as they came in. The training program was exactly what I wanted: a concrete, meaningful outlet. I said, “Okay, now I can focus on my day job because I have this on the side.” In retrospect, I already knew what my priorities were, but I tried not to take notice. Meanwhile, everyone at the office said, “You’re doing a good thing. As long as you’re getting your work done, it’s fine.”

Those first seven or eight months were a difficult juggling act. I was handling a new city with a new job and a very new context for dealing with a tough subject: it’s one thing to talk about sexual assault on a policy level; it’s another to get into the nitty-gritty of being told someone has been sexually assaulted and is sitting in the emergency room waiting for you. But the work I was doing felt important, and I’d leave the hospital exhausted but happy, satisfied that I was playing a small part in helping people.

It was St. Patrick’s Day. I was on the night shift and at 11 p.m., and a young woman about my age came in. I was assigned to help her. As a rape crisis counselor, sometimes your job is just to distract the survivor, so we spent hours together just talking, laughing. At one point, a nurse came in and said to me, “I thought you were the advocate.” I told her I was. “Oh, do you two know each other?” We had met that night, I responded. “That’s so wonderful! It just seems like you two are such good friends.”

That was when I knew. It was 8 a.m. when I left my shift and went straight to the office for my advertising job, in my same clothes from the night before. I hadn’t slept, but I didn’t care. I felt like I’d actually made a connection with someone — I’d made a real difference in that person’s life. I showed up to work, and everyone was yelling about advertising, and I just sat and watched, absolutely exhausted in my yoga pants. I thought, “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t do this anymore.”

It’s not that I had a problem with anyone in my job or in the industry. I think people mistake that part of the jump process — as if there’s always some clear adversary or bad guy that you jump from — but that’s not accurate. The truth is, whatever it is you’ve been doing, it becomes really hard to keep doing it when you identify a new value system and new priorities. If you then find yourself surrounded by people, on a day-to-day basis, who don’t share those priorities or values — it’s not anyone’s fault — it just makes it very hard not to jump.

As I sat there at work, my jump crystallized. I was going to leave advertising and go to law school so I could become a full-time advocate for sexual assault victims. The area in the hospital where I was most helpful and where I was most productive was teasing out the legal part of what was happening. In terms of making an impact, knowing people’s legal rights was a really big deal — especially at a public hospital where you work with underserved populations. And I realized that as nice as it was to support people emotionally, leveraging the law was an important tool for actually improving their lives.

My parents were supportive of law school, but they were concerned. I hadn’t told them that I was assaulted until long after the fact, and when I did, it troubled them — I don’t think any parent can hear that and feel good. And now they were worried I’d be setting myself up to hurt even more. I probably would have shared that sentiment had I not planted the seeds prior to jumping: by now, I knew what my jump would look like. I knew what I could do, what I would feel. The volunteering, the brainstorming — it was helpful for my parents, but most important, it was helpful for me.

Telling everyone at the office was hard. For many people who work in advertising, that industry is the pinnacle of professions. For most of my colleagues, this work was all they wanted to be doing, and they were confused that it wasn’t what I wanted. When I announced I was leaving, the response was, “Okay, good luck, but I don’t know why you’re leaving.”

The one exception was my former boss. She is French, and her understanding of work-life balance and chasing down a passion is very different from the traditional American perspective. In the months prior to my jump, she would say, “You do a good job, but I can tell when you’re passionate about something and when you’re just doing it. And I know that you’re not passionate about this.” And when the day came to hug her goodbye, she whispered in my ear, “You’re absolutely doing the right thing.”

Walking out of the office, I felt relieved. I had started to resent myself for not making a move. I’d had the urge to jump, but in my head, I would think, “Well, they say that in the real world you’re supposed to stay at your job for at least a year, and how will it look on my résumé if I leave before then?”

Turns out the answer is, who cares? I hated getting up in the morning. I hated going to work. I hated staying any amount of time past 5 p.m., which in advertising, you just do. I was putting all this time and effort into something I didn’t care about. No part of it was fun anymore. Whatever you’re doing, when it gets to that point, do yourself a favor and jump. It’s only scary until you leave.

Kelly O’Hara, a former advertising associate, is a law school student with plans to become an advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Excerpted from WHEN TO JUMP: If the Job You Have Isn’t the Life You Want by Mike Lewis, published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2018 by Mike Lewis. All rights reserved.

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5 books about sexual assault that schools are censoring – and why you should read them anyway

• Updated: Apr. 17, 2024, 1:48 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 17, 2024, 1:30 p.m.

One in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience sexual abuse or assault, and the ability to read books with storylines that help them understand their feelings are experiences is a lifeline. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey) AP

• Annabel Rocha | [email protected]

America’s war on women’s and LGBTQ+ individuals’ bodies and rights is trickling down to the books in our libraries. A new report by PEN America , an organization working to raise awareness for human rights through the protection of free expression through literature, found over 4,000 book bans in the first half of this school year alone, more than the total for last year’s entire academic year.

The censorship is taking extreme measures to ensure students cannot access these books, threatening librarians with prison times or thousands of dollars in fines for providing books labeled as “obscene” or “harmful”. A recent Washington Post investigation found that 27 states are considering at least 100 bills this year.

Themes of race, racism, LGBTQ+ topics and sexual violence are seeing the largest bans, leaving students stripped of representation and the opportunity to read about diverse experiences. According to PEN America, 19% of books banned during the 2021-2023 school years depicted rape and sexual assault, many of which were written for young adults.

“This is something that’s already very much a part of their lives,” Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) told the 19th yesterday. “Pretending that sexual violence is just an adult topic might make some people feel better, but kids know the truth.

According to RAINN, 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience sexual abuse or assault, and the ability to read books with storylines that help them understand their feelings are experiences is a lifeline.

Censorship is harmful, and books that promote visibility to those experiencing trauma and diverse experiences should not be banned. Here are a few titles to add to your reading list to support authors bringing awareness towards sexual assault and sexual violence.

“Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson Farrar Straus Giroux

“ Speak ” by Laurie Halse Anderson

“Speak” is a classic for many millennials, in both book and movie form, with an adaptation starring pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart . It depicts the story of Melinda, a high school student who stops speaking after being sexually assaulted, and is considered one of the American Library Association’s most challenged books , banned 14 times in the 2022-2023 school year alone.

"All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson Macmillian Publishers

“ All Boys Aren’t Blue ” by George M. Johnson

Through a series of personal essays, this book touches on the intersections of gender, sexual identity, race, and more – striking multiple nerves with those looking to strip these identities out of libraries.

“Students ... have publicly said on record that works like mine have saved their lives, works like mine have helped them name their abusers, works like mine have helped them come to terms with who they are and feel validated in the fact that there is somebody else that exists in the world like them,” Johnson told NPR in 2022. “And you want to remove that from them. I just think it’s sad.”

“Sold” by Patricia McCormick Hyperion

“ Sold ” by Patricia McCormick

Depicting accounts of sexual slavery, “Sold” tied for sixth most banned book in the U.S. in fall 2022, banned in 11 school districts in 6 states.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood Penguin Random House

“ The Handmaid’s Tale ” by Margaret Atwood

This feminist dystopian novel has been making waves as we eerily watch women’s rights in the U.S. picked away since the Dobbs decision. It has been challenged for “ vulgarity and sexual overtones .”

“The Nowhere Girls” by Amy Reed Simon and Schuster

“ The Nowhere Girls ” by Amy Reed

“The Nowhere Girls” tells the story of a group of high schoolers banding together to resist sexism and the sexual abuse of women at their school, transforming the lives of classmates and their community.

To locate your local library here and request books go here .

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Updated Biden administration rules will soon affect students across US: What to know

Students and school employees across America will be impacted in the fall by new changes to a rule that affects all federally-funded schools.

Practically, it's a sweeping update to how schools will have to handle sex discrimination and abuse cases. Politically, it's a part of a power struggle between the Trump and Biden administrations.

What's new? The Biden administration released a new set of rules this week overhauling the Trump administration's Title IX rules – which gave more rights to alleged perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment. The new rules also stipulate further protections for LGBTQ+ students as well as parenting and pregnant students.

What is Title IX? Title IX is a civil rights law that bans sex discrimination against students, employees and others at public schools, colleges and universities that receive federal funding.

What were some of the old rules? For cases of sexual assault, they stipulated that schools only had to investigate claims that met a certain threshold of sex discrimination and were made through a formal reporting process. It also raised the bar of proof for sexual misconduct on college campuses. They prohibited investigations of cases that occurred off campus.

Why does the change matter? Critics argued the Trump-era rules prevented people accused of sexual harassment, assault or discrimination from facing repercussions. Supporters contended the rules rightly strengthened due-process protections for accused students or faculty members.

Biden's new Title IX rules will affect people on the nation's school campuses starting in August.

What happened this week?

The Biden administration's new set of guidance overhauls Trump-era rules that in part narrowed which and how schools could investigate sex discrimination cases. President Joe Biden in his 2020 presidential campaign vowed to overturn the changes made under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The new rules expand the definition of sexual assault and harassment. That means schools could investigate more cases of discrimination, abuse or harassment filed by people on school campuses under the scope of the law.

College student survivors will no longer be required to attend live hearings or go through cross examinations. And people will be given the right to "prompt and equitable grievance procedures," the rule reads.

LGBTQ+ students will be guaranteed protection under the law if they are discriminated against for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Pregnant and parenting students who might receive unwanted sexual attention, shame or punishment at schools will also be granted more protections from sex discrimination in the admissions process and on campus.

“These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

Who is impacted by the changes to Title IX?

The rule changes have a wide range of effects on students, among the most notable examples:

• Sexual assault survivors : The new rules will have sweeping effects on survivors of sexual misconduct and those accused of crimes. Among the changes: The definition of sexual assault will be expanded in K-12 schools and colleges.
• LGBTQ+ students : Biden's Title IX update stipulates protections from sex discrimination based gender identity for the first time.
• Pregnant and parenting students : The new regulations extend the definition of "sex-based harassment" to include pregnant people on campuses.

Ruling on transgender student participation in sports remains unsettled

The Biden administration did not rule on whether transgender and nonbinary students can participate on the sports teams that align with their gender.

The administration released a proposed rule in April 2023 that said schools and colleges largely could not ban nonbinary and transgender students from sports teams in the new Title IX rules.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected] .  Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

Mariska Hargitay opens up about experience with sexual assault in personal essay

Mariska Hargitay is opening up about a sexual assault she said she experienced in her 30s.

In a personal essay she wrote for People , the " Law & Order: Special Victims Unit " star, who is known for playing Detective Olivia Benson on the hit show, revealed that the alleged perpetrator was a friend, whom she did not name.

"It wasn't sexual at all," Hargitay wrote. "It was dominance and control. Overpowering control. He was a friend. Then he wasn't. I tried all the ways I knew to get out of it. I tried to make jokes, to be charming, to set a boundary, to reason, to say no."

MORE: Sexual assault survivor turns 'deepest secret' into documentary 'Second Assault'

"I didn't want it to escalate to violence," she continued. "I now know it was already sexual violence, but I was afraid he would become physically violent."

"I checked out of my body," she wrote. "I couldn't process it. I couldn't believe that it happened. That it could happen."

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Following the incident, Hargitay said that she "removed it from my narrative" and "minimized" her experience, especially while building Joyful Heart , an organization she founded aimed at "transforming society's response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse in the U.S."

She wrote that it wasn't until "things started shifting in me" that she began telling those closest to her about her experience. "They were gentle and kind and careful, but their naming it was important," she said. "Then I had my own realization. My own reckoning."

Now, as Hargitay approaches 60, the actress said she is "able to see clearly what was done to me."

"I understand the neurobiology of trauma," she wrote. "Trauma fractures our mind and our memory. The way a mirror fractures."

The actress also shared her hope for others who have had the same experience, saying that she wants people "to be able to talk about sexual assault the same way they now talk about cancer."

MORE: Sexual assault survivor shares 3 things she wants victims to know

"Tell someone you've survived cancer, and you're celebrated. I want the same response for sexual assault survivors. I want no shame with the victim," Hargitay said.

She also said that justice for her would be an "acknowledgment and an apology" from the person who assaulted her.

"This is a painful part of my story," she said. "The experience was horrible. But it doesn't come close to defining me, in the same way that no other single part of my story defines me."

You can seek help by calling the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE(4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.

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‘Little to no accountability’: House Intel report finds CIA failed to properly handle sexual assaults within

The CIA failed to properly handle sexual assault among its own employees according to a bipartisan report from the House intelligence committee.

The CIA provided “little to no accountability or punishment for confirmed perpetrators,” and there was “confusion and disorder” in the process for reporting sexual assaults and harassment, the investigation’s final report, obtained by Politico, found.

The eight “key findings” listed in the report “were generally illustrative of long-standing issues with the internal reporting structure at CIA,” the committee stated.

“Victims were deterred from coming forward because victims did not have anonymity and were unable to seek confidential assistance,” the report states.

“There was ineffective training for employees on how to identify and report cases of sexual assault and harassment,” it continues. “There was an inconsistent approach to, or lack of, timely coordination with law enforcement.”

Every day the govt. employees get away with all of their crimes from JFK & beyond are all still being entirely covered up by Democrat & Republican parties that are an oligarchies public relations selected to farm groups of people. Yes the entire system is corrupt, ALL of it — John Charles Hamilton Mastroligulano (@EngineerEarth) April 22, 2024

The committee called out several offices by name for their shortcomings:

The Threat Management Unit (TMU) had an unclear role and lacked the necessary training for sexual assault investigations, which complicated the TMU’s role in response efforts.

The Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office lacked the necessary resources and authority to fulfill its intended purpose.

The Office of Equal Employment Opportunity had internal issues that rendered it unable to effectively engage in response efforts.

According to Politico, “The committee started its inquiry in January 2023 after a female CIA employee alleged that she had been physically attacked and sexually assaulted by a fellow officer at CIA headquarters.”

“POLITICO, which revealed the investigation last April, reported that the agency had not punished a male colleague who had tried to forcibly kiss her repeatedly and that the agency did nothing when she reported the incident,” the outlet adds. “Numerous other whistleblowers also went to the committee and shared their own stories of sexual assault and harassment while at the agency. During its investigation, the committee interviewed more than 20 CIA whistleblowers, reviewed more than 4,000 pages of documents the agency gave it and held two oversight hearings.”

Not surprising at all. No consequences for any government malfeasance. Only for Donald Trump imaginary crimes. — John G (@USASWATCopper) April 22, 2024

“Over the course of the investigation, the committee discovered that CIA failed to handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment within its workforce in the professional and uniform manner that such sensitive allegations warrant,” according to the executive summary of the report.

The committee also praised the “many officers within CIA’s workforce, at all levels, who recognized the need to improve CIA’s response to sexual assault and harassment, while maintaining the necessary posture to prepare officers for the dangerous world they are asked to operate in.”

“The Committee commends the efforts, frequently initiated by the victims themselves, to create safe spaces for victims to report and relay their experiences and to improve the agency’s responsiveness to such allegations,” they state.

Ultimately, however, the committee found that the CIA failed to implement “prudent recommendations.”

“Through the Committee’s investigation, it became clear that various individuals and working groups within CIA had identified prudent recommendations for improving CIA’s sexual assault and harassment response processes, but that that CIA failed to fully implement some or all of those recommendations,” the committee wrote. “It was evident CIA was unable to appropriately address the challenges due to its lack of certain tools and authorities.”

Defund Defund Defund — Red.California2024 (@Republican4CA) April 22, 2024

“The CIA said that it established an office in 2021 that advocates for officers who are dealing with sexual assault and harassment concerns and last June hired an experienced outside expert on sexual assault to lead that office,” Politico reports. “It said it also has made changes to strengthen its disciplinary processes and streamlined the way employees can report allegations and find resources to address their individual circumstances.”

“We take the issue of sexual assault and harassment extremely seriously,” the CIA told Politico in a statement. “We are absolutely committed to fostering a safe, respectful workplace environment for our employees and have taken significant steps to ensure that, both by bolstering our focus on prevention and strengthening the agency’s handling of these issues when they arise.”

“The committee said the agency had cooperated with the investigation and ‘demonstrated an eagerness to effectively prevent and respond to sexual assault and harassment instances,'” the outlet reports. “It also praised CIA Director Bill Burns and other senior leadership for working with the committee during its investigation.

“During the course of its probe, the committee and later Congress passed legislative language in the Intelligence Authorization Act that is supposed to improve how victims report assaults and give more options to them to confidentially report such attacks and also require more sunlight into how such reports are handled.”

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Critic’s Notebook

‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction

How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

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By A.O. Scott

One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.

“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.

The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?

Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”

Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .

As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.

“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.

Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .

“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.

I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.

As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.

“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.

That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)

One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.

Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”

In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.

For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.

Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.

James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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Justice Department has agreed to pay $100 million to Nassar survivors, report says

The Justice Department has agreed to pay about $100 million to survivors of Larry Nassar , the former USA Gymnastics team doctor who sexually assaulted hundreds of female athletes, USA TODAY reported .

The settlement, which has not yet been finalized, was to resolve allegations of the FBI's failures to immediately investigate abuse claims against Nassar. Payments will be distributed to around 100 women abused by the former doctor.

Dozens of women, including Simone Biles and other Olympic gold medalists, filed claims in 2022 accusing the FBI of negligence for failing to look into credible allegations of sexual abuse against Nassar.

John Manly, who represents many of Nassar's victims, declined to comment. A spokesman said the Justice Department can't confirm the settlement. The Wall Street Journal first reported about the settlement Wednesday.

'FBI failed survivors': Massive systematic failures uncovered in DOJ's Larry Nassar report

In 2021, the Justice Department Inspector General released a scathing report that found W. Jay Abbott, former head of the FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office, and an unidentified FBI agent took eight months to respond when the first allegations against Nassar arrived at their office in 2015. 

The inspector general's investigation found that FBI officials' failure to respond resulted in more than 100 gymnasts being sexually abused by Nassar. The report found that Abbott and another unnamed agent provided false statements during interviews to "minimize errors" by agents in the Indianapolis field office. Abbott also violated ethics guidelines while negotiating for a job with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee during the investigation, according to the report.

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As the FBI's investigation languished, Nassar continued working with athletes for more than a year.

When the Indianapolis field office did respond to the allegations, it made "fundamental errors," including failing to notify its counterpart in Lansing, Mich., where Nassar was employed at Michigan State University.

In 2022, the Justice Department announced it would not pursue federal charges against Abbott and the other unnamed agent.

Nassar's crimes were uncovered and first made public in 2016 by an IndyStar investigation into sexual abuse within Indianapolis-based USA Gymnastics, the national governing body for the sport. He was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison in 2018.

Michigan State in 2018 agreed to pay $500 million to settle lawsuits filed by survivors. USA Gymnastics reached a separate settlement of $380 million in 2021.

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Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at [email protected] .