Content Warning: This article discusses sexual assault. If you would like to speak to someone regarding sexual assault, the Center for Advocacy, Prevention, and Empowerment is the resource that I turned to and found most helpful. Be well.
Dear Betsy,
The day your news came out about the new Title IX regulations, it was the two-year anniversary of my assault.
Two years ago, I reported. Here’s what happened.
He didn’t get punished. The school handed down a no-contact order in which we had to promise not to try to contact each other, either directly or through an intermediary. That’s it.
He wasn’t removed from his job, a job we both worked at and had to attend a one-week long training for. We were in the same room with each other for eight hours a day. I had to sit in the same row as him and still believe that it wasn’t my fault and the school was trying to protect me.
He wasn’t removed from housing, despite it being the first office I reported him to and the first people through which the Title IX report was filed. The year after I was assaulted, we lived in the same building, two floors apart. At night, I would stay awake, staring at the ceiling and calculating the ways in which I could hide from him.
The week I moved in, I spent three hours walking the building and finding all the hiding spots and exits.
I lost 10 pounds during my first quarter as a survivor. He was allowed to eat from the same dining halls as me, and there weren’t many options for other living spaces at my school. I was so scared of running into him that I stopped eating at the dining halls and began getting my food to-go. After my first encounter with him, that stopped too.
I couldn’t focus in class. I spent two hours exploring Sturm, finding every single set of stairs and exit. To this day, I can tell you where all the stairs are and every single way to evade someone.
Walking to and from class was and still is a nightmare. To this day, I plug my headphones in, put my head down and speed walk from one place to another. I used to like tabling outside of Sturm, getting to greet people that I knew. Now, tabling outside of Sturm is a new nightmare, one where I scan every single group that’s coming in for that familiar face, that backpack, that jacket.
You know, it’s a new skill I’ve learned—I can scan a group in 20 seconds and tell you if he’s in there.
I reported, and DU did nothing. They told me that I couldn’t contact him and he couldn’t contact me. That’s fine—I wasn’t planning on reaching out to him. The little security this no-contact order gave me disappeared when I realized it did not protect me from working with him or seeing him in the halls. That no-contact order was a bureaucratic piece of paper, and it did nothing that blocking his number and social media accounts didn’t already accomplish.
Title IX brought a case against him, but I never heard what happened to it or how things turned out. I was disillusioned with what anyone could accomplish and aware of my position as a woman of color and his as a white male.
Betsy, your new guidelines silence survivors. You restrict what can be defined as assault on college campuses, and you restrict where campuses can investigate 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.”
It seems like the exact opposite is true. On the basis of sex, any person may be excluded from participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
I reported, and I lived in absolute terror and fear for a year. I still live with the fear of running into him on campus, having to see him and know that he’s walked away with no consequence. I reported, and nothing happened.
Imagine how many other people never reported because this, what happened to me, is what they fear. Imagine how many other people will now no longer report because of new guidelines that do nothing to protect survivors. Think about it.
He lived with the “consequence” for a year. Last summer, the no-contact order expired, and the school found no reason to renew it.
Living in the same building with him was just the start. I am living with his ghost for the rest of my life.
And you did nothing.
