…though it hurt, I found that I was able to draw on more ancient hurts than that – and that is how I survived. This is how we all survive. We default to the oldest scar. -Anne Enright, The Gathering
“Be part of our college story!” the header enthused.
When my alma mater invited me to participate in its Memory Project, my initial response was to hit delete. “Please feel free to take off from our guidelines in any direction you like,” the invitation urged. “There are no wrong answers.”
I started waking at three in the morning flooded by memories. Nobody really wants to know, I told myself. Yet the intensity of my response told me I needed to write it down, even if I never shared it.
“Why are you doing this?” my husband asked.
“Let yr heart be your geiger counter: feel it,” writes poet Mary Karr. In her third memoir Lit, she says writing her truth just about did her in. To create is to be seen; to be seen is to risk harm. According to the Guardian, women writers are most likely to receive threats that include sexual violence.
In hearings about the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol, women were threatened far more often and viciously than male witnesses.
In the United States, about one in three women and one in six men face sexual violence. Women are especially vulnerable during the first weeks or months of college, with one in four experiencing rape or attempted rape. Students working their way through college, as I did, are more likely to be targeted.
A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that one in sixteen American women report that rape was their first sexual experience, which “left a legacy of negative health outcomes for survivors.” According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, eighty-one percent of female and thirty-five percent of male survivors report post-traumatic stress of varying duration.
Scott Berkowitz of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network emphasizes that the “reaction of the first person they tell is going to have a big effect on everything that happens next….” Those who share early with someone who listens and accepts suffer less long-term damage.
After I was assaulted spring quarter of my first college year, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be held by my mother.”
Re-reading journals from that time, I see how blaming myself provided a sort of agency. I dropped my classes and set up independent studies, read mountains of books by women, and immersed myself in linguistic and cultural anthropology. I traveled to a remote Mexican community, where for eight months I spoke only Spanish.
My Spanish-speaking mind had never been assaulted.
Just before I left for Mexico, a student who shouted abuse outside my dorm room after the rape confessed that he and his roommate placed money on whether they could get me to kill myself.
“We looked for girls who were vulnerable,” he said.
When I wrote my Memory Project pages, Kavanaugh, Epstein, and Weinstein weren’t yet household names. Although Tarana Burke first posted about #MeToo in 2006, I hadn’t heard about it. During my years as a counselor/advocate for rape survivors, we were trained not to share our own experiences but to focus on the survivor.
When I wrote about rape, my computer sometimes crashed, as if my own fingers conspired to delete my experience.
To erase me.
After I sent my Memory Project draft to the alumni committee that made the original request, a former classmate and subsequent college dean responded.
“Hi Kirie! I just read your submission to the Memory Project. Wow! It is beautifully written, full of vivid detail, and intimate in its revelations. Your recollections provoked my memories not only of you and your experiences (I remember the outrage some of us felt on your behalf), but of many other people and events. It does just what a good memoir should do; reminded me how our few women faculty members were blazing paths, of how sexist the world was (not that it’s much less now), of how our protests against war and conventionality, against indifference to the environment, shaped our lives. Of our attempts to find freedom and joy to replace fear and coercion. On and on, the memories you provoked for me by the telling of your story. What a gift.
“The Reunion, where early entries to the Project will be shared, is coming up soon. I’m hoping you might be planning on attending and reminiscing some more with others, especially those who have also submitted memories. We’re planning a breakfast for the Founding Classes to do just this.”
I booked a rental and paid for the reunion breakfast and evening banquet.
As my husband and I were packing, the college dean, whom I’d never met, called. “Are you coming to the reunion?” he asked.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Good,” the dean said. “I’m glad.” He didn’t sound glad. “When you sent your piece, you said you weren’t sure you wanted to share it.”
“Oh, I’m fine with it now,” I said.
“Well, your piece isn’t fine,” he said. “I have bad news for you. I ran it past university counsel, and they say you might have committed libel.” He paused. “Maybe you don’t care about that.”
“Libel? You mean about being raped?” I imagined the stranger who assaulted me, whose name I’d never known, reading my pages and filing suit. “Or about the students who harassed me afterward?”
“All of that, I guess.” I needed to withdraw my contribution or change it, he told me. “And so I won’t be charged with discrimination, if you don’t pull yours, the entire project is dead.”
“Can you let me know what you want changed?”
“I’m not a writer,” he said. “And I’m all for women having a voice and being protected, of course. A student just came into my office this week to report some problems.” He sighed. “I guess it still happens.”
“You are never the same,” I wrote in my journal after the rape. “The assailant lives inside you, coiled like a snake, and no matter how many times you make love because you choose to, he was there first.”
Trauma scholar Jonathan Shay states that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) is “a normal reaction to an abnormal event…moral injury as a result of the ‘betrayal of what’s right in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power.’” Traumatic memory enters the body and “stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical process that not only changes the physiology of the victims, but the physiology of their offspring.”
Weinstein preyed on young women who wanted to be stars. Epstein and Maxwell targeted girls and young women who wanted to attend art school or model. At Pennsylvania State University, coach and serial predator Jerry Sandusky preyed on boys from vulnerable families.
In Know My Name, rape survivor Chanel Miller documents how she was silenced by Stanford University after being assaulted by an Olympic swimmer hopeful. She cites Jennifer J. Freyd, whose research indicates that institutional betrayal causes “harm that occurs above and beyond that caused by the sexual violence itself.”
Professor Freyd describes institutional DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), which occurs when rape victims are accused of lying, as “a particularly aggressive form of betrayal.”
At the reunion breakfast, contrary to what the dean had told me, the Memory Project sponsors encouraged everyone to send contributions. In the restroom, bright gold cards stacked in each stall stated that “Sexual violence, including sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking, is prohibited by Title IX.” The college “does not tolerate sexual violence and is dedicated to maintaining a respectful and safe environment.”
At the evening banquet, the dean extolled our school’s virtues. “Some may have had darker experiences,” he added. Several in the audience laughed.
“That part’s for you,” my husband whispered. “Rape’s no good for fund-raising.”
A former classmate leapt to his feet. “Get out your checkbooks!” he shouted.
That night, I woke from a dead sleep unable to breathe, as if a giant foot was planted on my chest. For the next two weeks, I could barely move.
Novelist Hanya Yanagihara says, “every female I know has had some sort of experience which is not necessarily violence, but an awareness of being made to be a sexual being before you are ready to be a sexual being.” I was always envious of friends whose first sexual experience was their choice.
Dr. Vincent Iacopino, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, says that photography, as happened during my assault and with many Epstein and Maxwell survivors, is “a form of sexual humiliation. It’s cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment at a minimum and may constitute torture.”
When I returned to my dorm after the assault, I wrote, “I look out my window at my fellow students, backpacks slung over shoulders, voices floating up to my third-floor room. How can I still live after this?”
In the New Yorker, Rebecca Makkai writes, “I was torn between the desire to show how well I was dealing with things and the imperative to show that I was not O.K., that this man’s actions had derailed my life in a thousand ways.”
Five months after the reunion, I learned that my alma mater was the subject of a federal investigation for Title IX Civil Rights violations. Shortly before the dean’s call demanding I pull my pages, a local media outlet revealed that my college, along with a hundred others nationwide, was under investigation for failing to respond appropriately to reports of campus sexual abuse. Instead, they were “silencing survivors of sexual violence by dismissing their cases.”
If one in five college students is raped, the report stated, a campus of my alma mater’s size would have four hundred assaults a year. Yet, over a three-year period, only twelve students called any of those help numbers on the bright-gold cards I’d seen in the campus restroom.
One of the few who reported was asked if she orgasmed, and then told that crying, going numb, or being silent did not mean that it was rape. Another had to face her assailant when she walked into her first seminar.
Of the twelve reports, only three resulted in disciplinary action, and one of the assailants then sued the college.
In 2019, George Tyndall, a physician at the University of Southern California, was convicted of sexual battery by fraud and other charges that included possession of illicit photographs. The University paid over a billion dollars in damages. Attorneys suggested Tyndall might have assaulted as many as 17,000 women. For years, complaints by students and others were handled internally by university administrators. Dr. Tyndall was allowed to resign and receive his full pension. Only after the Los Angeles Times provided in-depth reporting were charges investigated, and the crimes prosecuted.
Under revisions to Title IX enacted during Donald Trump’s first administration by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a rape that occurs off campus would not fall under Title IX jurisdiction. However, if I’d reported to law enforcement, which never crossed my mind, the assailant might have been charged. Among the hundreds of rape survivors I later worked with, only one reported to police, and only one case, a child of fifteen who was also beaten, went to trial. The assailant, whose attorney portrayed the girl as sexually active, was found not guilty. “Who hasn’t been knocked around a few times,” one of the jury members told me.
Lux Alptraum argues that women must abandon the idea that “If we work within the system, the system will reward us. If we hustle hard enough, vote hard enough, carry ourselves with enough confidence, show that the data is on our side, and bravely share uncomfortable truths, we’ll be able to break through.” She encourages visible protest, although it can be “ugly, discomforting, and inconvenient.”
Author Jessica Knoll was gang-raped at fifteen. During the assault, she saw her own blood and didn’t know quite where it came from or exactly how it happened. “I know what it’s like to shut down and power through, to have no other choice than to pretend to be OK. I am a savant of survivor mode,” Knoll writes. “The trouble is that denying rape doesn’t unrape you.”
While writing my response to the Memory Project, I contacted several professors who were former mentors. One asked if I thought a young woman having an affair with a married professor could damage the student. Another, to whom I sent my draft, wrote back that “to state your submission constituted libel is really stretching it. I mentioned it to someone who served as provost for many years and dealt with such issues, and they thought it was nonsense and even wondered if your submission had actually been shown to the AGs. Really shocking to me is that they would even suggest that you change your piece. I'm really sorry you've had to go through this. I sympathize more than you could possibly know.”
Hortense Calisher writes that women confirm reality through expressing themselves verbally, tactilely, visually, musically, and kinesthetically. “Speaking out loud is an antidote to shame,” she says. Canadian author Miriam Toews says, “every trauma produces a choice: paralysis or the psychic energy to move forward.”
In London Review of Books, novelist Anne Enright writes, “Last year I spoke to a young female doctor who has on occasion been sexually assaulted or insulted by men under her care. What are they thinking? One answer is that they think she is a nurse and that they are, by long-standing tradition, entitled to molest nurses. Another is that they can’t bear to be so vulnerable: it is more important to them to make a woman uneasy than it is to get better. A third is that they suffer from a compulsive disorder of some kind. … The #MeToo movement isn’t just a challenge to male entitlement: it may also pose a general question about male sanity.
“Over Christmas 2017,” Enright continues, “as the litanies spilled out and the men looked uneasy, no one was talking about the guy on the bus or the boys on the corner. They spoke instead about men in power, especially at work, the feeling that what was violated was not their body, but their gift.”
a compound fracture of tragedies...no words, just ancient tears.
Great story that speaks to the moment.