What It Feels Like Living In Province?
Meeting “the Other Side”: Conversations with Men Accused of Sexual Assault
In 2011, I helped launch a movement to aid survivors on college campuses. That meant I also had to think hard about the rights of those under scrutiny.
First there was Harvey Weinstein. Then there was Kevin Spacey and the director Brett Ratner. Then Jeffrey Tambor and Louis C.K. Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor. The accusations of sexual abuse that made the headlines were usually about famous men, and many of their victims were famous as well. Plenty of the allegations recounted abuses in the penthouse suites of luxury hotels. But ordinary people saw themselves in the stories, too. The boss who offered you extra shifts in exchange for a date. The meeting when you told the principal a classmate had raped you, and he suspended you instead. That time when you felt you could not say no. That time you said no, and it didn’t matter. So we said, “Me too.”
Others recognized themselves in a different aspect of the stories. They could be one of those men. They could be a name on a list.
Almost as soon as the first stories broke, critics and commentators raised concerns about the accused. What about due process?, they asked. I heard that question in two different tones. One was the even, perplexed voice of a real questioner, searching in good faith for answers: What is the best, fairest way to respond to troubling allegations? The other was indignant, loud, interrupting: How dare we threaten a man’s good name? How could that ever be fair? To these critics, any consequence at all was a violation of due process.
For those of us who had been involved in the movement to address campus sexual assaults, this backlash was familiar. In 2011, when I was an undergrad at Yale, I joined fifteen friends to file a complaint against the university with the U.S. Department of Education. By tolerating sexual harassment, including violence, against students like us, we said, the university had violated the law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools: Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments. The Department of Education investigated Yale and spurred it to change its policies. The school abandoned its opaque, labyrinthine reporting systems and débuted a clearer process for survivors to come forward. It also started publishing regular reports about what kinds of sexual-harassment complaints it had received and their outcomes, giving the community some insight into behind-the-scenes decisions. The process still wasn’t perfect, but it was much improved.
Around the same time, a friend of a friend named Dana Bolger was organizing against Amherst College’s handling of sexual abuses. We talked on the phone, and then over e-mail and on Facebook. Online, we connected with students and young alumni of other colleges who had faced similar issues. In those conversations, we swapped advocacy strategies, pooled our experiences, and came to see common threads. One was that few of us had known about our rights under Title IX when we needed them. During the summer of 2013, Dana and I decided to put together legal explainers for student survivors. We called the project Know Your IX. Working with other activists, we wrote up the basics of Title IX’s protections against sexual harassment and offered tips about organizing on campus. We published those resources on a Web site and distributed them on social media.
Know Your IX grew from a summer project to a national campaign. I wish I could say that it expanded because of our strategic insight. But the truth is that the scope of the problem and the need for an organized student voice was much greater than we had anticipated. Our first big action was a 2013 protest outside the Department of Education, at which we delivered a petition with more than a hundred and seventy-three thousand signatures, pushing the department to enforce Title IX and hold schools accountable for wrongdoings. Although we initially faced resistance from government officials, during the next few years many of our demands prompted changes in federal policy. The department started publicly announcing when its investigations turned up Title IX violations. It guaranteed that undocumented survivors could file Title IX complaints without risking deportation. And it clearly instructed schools to offer support services like mental-health care to survivors free of charge.
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