"Affirmative consent is a tremendous step for colleges and universities like Grinnell because it encourages sexual partners to foster a healthy and respectful dialogue about the sexual acts they perform. The concept is sound, progressive, and in many ways, feminist. But “yes means yes” policies at Grinnell can only be effective if the administration fully complies with Title IX and protects students who report sexual assaults. So the pressing questions are: Does the institution stand behind students who have been raped? Does Grinnell’s administration put (feminist) action behind its lofty, self-congratulatory words?
The simple answer is no, Grinnell is not necessarily a safe environment for survivors to report rape. Many rape survivors I know and love no longer attend Grinnell because the administration and Title IX programs at Grinnell have so dramatically failed them.
But surely the College has put structures in place to those that they identify as victims? Nope. Grinnell’s no-contact orders are ambiguous enough that while my rapist cannot deliberately communicate with me, he can violate my physical space, which makes me feel unsafe on campus. From what we’ve observed, Grinnell rarely—if ever—expels students found responsible for “sexual misconduct,” and it is more common for rape survivors to transfer because, in most cases, rapists are granted more protection than their victims at Grinnell."
This week, Grinnell joined the “National Week of Action to End Sexual Assault.” As the events of the week have demonstrated, this campaign is politically loaded but every bit as vacuous as it sounds. On Monday, Grinnell released the “It’s On Us” video, which delivers a number of empty, vague and over-determined statements as the only terms by which the campus community can think about and discuss sexual violence. What makes these statements so ideologically dangerous is that such an appeal to a univocal campus community inevitably silences and erases any dissenting voices. How can one ‘disagree’ with the video? Of course we all want to end sexual assault in any we can. These statements are obvious and appeal to our common sense. However, when active-bystanderism is presented as the most self-evident and transparent solution to sexual assault, the long history of misogyny that leads to rape is forgotten. Why not provide students with anti-sexist training? That might also prevent them from raping people. However, we did learn one important lesson from the College’s propagandistic video: “It’s On Us” to call bullsh*t on the administration and hold them accountable for their egregious violations of Title IX.
Q: Why are we wearing red tape over our mouths?
A: We are wearing red tape over our mouths to align ourselves with the red tape campaign that has been used at many other colleges and universities. The red tape signifies the systematic silencing of rape survivors and of meaningful conversations about sexual violence on college campuses across this country. At Grinnell, rape survivors are not allowed to define their experiences as rape. We can only use the term “sexual misconduct.” This suggests that students make sexual mistakes, rather than commit violent assaults that have lasting physical and psychological effects on victim survivors. We find this appalling.
Q: Why are the conversations about sexual violence on campus lacking and superficial?
A: We take the College’s recent “It’s On Us” video campaign as emblematic of the conversations we are allowed to have about sexual violence on this campus. First of all, the video mandates a consensus about the college community’s stance on sexual violence prevention and response. The video distributes equal responsibility for preventing and responding to sexual assault among students, staff and administrators, concealing the fact that there are major power imbalances and different (legal) responsibilities between these groups. It also greatly oversimplifies the issue of sexual violence, and suggests that active-bystanderism is the most effective means of prevention.
Q: Why is active-bystanderism not the most effective means of prevention?
A: Most sexual assaults do not happen with anyone around. Indeed, students here at Grinnell have been drugged in private and taken somewhere remote to enact sexual violence. No bystander could have intervened. Nearly 60 percent of sexual assaults occur in the victims’ own residences, and an additional 31 percent occur in other living quarters—all behind closed doors.* And studies have shown that bystanders are much less likely to act if the people know each other, which makes up the vast majority of sexual assaults. Focusing on active-bystanderism perpetuates a rape and rescue fantasy in which students—primarily men, as shown in the video—can protect others from rape, even though this is statistically untrue.
Q: What kind of meaningful conversations/counter-knowledges are we trying to establish, and how can others get involved?
A: Because Grinnell refuses to allow survivors to name their experiences as rape, the terms for tonight’s discussion have been already set. The lived experiences of survivors have been rendered invisible, yet the College insists that they “take reports of sexual assault seriously.” The College does not provide punitive outcomes for rapists, preferring “educational sanctions,” which result in brief suspension at most. There are currently students who have been found responsible for multiple counts of “sexual misconduct” still on campus. This does not create a “safe” environment, as the College purports. Based on our experiences, is also more common for the College to expel students for plagiarism than for “sexual misconduct,” revealing that Grinnell values intellectual property over the bodies of students. The real litmus test for the College’s commitment to ending sexual violence is the punitive measures directed towards those found responsible for “sexual misconduct.”
We will be having a consciousness-raising meeting on Monday night at 7:30 pm in BCA 161 to further discuss these serious issues. We invite you to join us, get more information and help hold the College accountable for its negligence.
* National Institute of Justice
"Dissenting Voices is a student-driven campaign to end campus sexual violence. We are an activist group committed to educating students about their civil right to education free from sexual violence and harassment, while also pushing policy and legislative change at the college level for better administrative enforcement of that same right. Dissenting Voices aims to provide a checks and balance system between the law on the books, the College’s administration of those laws, and survivors on the ground. To that end, we work to educate our fellow students about their rights and empower them to take action for safety and equality on campus; we are committed to bringing students’ voices, experiences and concerns to the administration in order to implement better, more sustained practices that enforce Title IX, Clery Act and the Dear Colleague Letter. Our first priority is not to the College’s brand but to the best practices for prevention and, when that fails, reducing survivor trauma to the best of our ability. We have seen and personally experienced the failures of the administration in Title IX compliance, like most schools all over this country. We take the call of SGA’s recent “It’s On Us” campaign—also aligned with a national movement—quite seriously. Indeed, it sparked the formation of our group.
As dedicated students at Grinnell, we have tried for several years to work within the terms of “civil discourse” and “self-governance” to address our concerns about the College’s Title IX policies and enforcement. Many of us have been on relevant committees, met with administrators and written detailed opinion pieces for student publications that provide suggestions for improvement. Yet, we have seen little improvement in the experiences of rape survivors on Grinnell’s campus. For this reason, we want to provide students with accurate information about sexual violence on campus and work as a watchdog group to ensure that the College fulfills its legal obligation to protect survivors by complying with Title IX, current Clery Act revisions and the Dear Colleague Letter. http://knowyourix.org/title-ix/title-ix-the-basics/
Dissenting Voices is committed to promoting awareness and student safety on campus. Like many other campus groups across the nation, we believe that continued activism is needed to end rape on campus: http://endrapeoncampus.org/. Our goals are simple: we expect the College, like every other institution in the country that receives federal funding, to comply with federal law, and in so doing, protect survivors of sexual assault, rape and sodomy, as stipulated by—and as the College reports every year in—the Jeanne Clery Act. We simply request that the administration take immediate steps to improve its Title IX compliance."
