by M.G.
My name is Megan Grove.
It’s been over two years since I originally posted my story on Our Stories Untold as M.G. Two years this past April. The same month that I tried to take my own life at EMU ten years ago. And as these years roll by, bleeding one into the next, I wonder how many people had and continue to have experiences similar to mine. How many people – survivors of sexual assault and violence and people with mental health issues—feel unsupported, untrusted, disbelieved, unequipped, unsafe? How many people has EMU continued to harm due to its handling of sexual assault accusations?
I end nearly every email and phone call with my Into Account advocate, Hilary Scarsella, with the words, “I am so grateful for you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Where we left off
Let me take a step back, to 2016 when I first wrote my post. While I used my initials in the post and recognized that readers may figure out my identity, I made it clear that if someone wanted to respond to my post they would need to do it through my advocate. I asked that no one attempt to communicate with me directly, and I did not put any personal contact information on my post.
A few days after posting, I got a phone call from an EMU number on my personal cell phone and my heart stopped. I let the call go to voicemail and then listened as EMU’s interim president asked me to give her a call. I felt myself on the verge of a panic attack, “Why was she calling me? What did she want?” Assuming this call was related to my post, I felt anxious and uncomfortable that she reached out to me personally instead through of my advocate, like I’d requested.
I called my advocate, Hilary, furious at EMU for disregarding my clear instructions and digging around to find my identity and my phone number. My advocate then reached out to the interim president by phone and email to make it clear that neither she nor others from EMU were welcome to contact me directly. Hilary invited the president to let us know what she wanted to talk to me about. My advocate also communicated that I would be open to a phone call but only if my advocate was also on the line.
The president’s office responded with this email: “Thank you for your note. Please assure MG that I will respect her wishes and not contact her again. I was very moved by her story and wanted to reach out. Please tell her also that if, in the future, she would want to contact me, I would be open to that.”
While I appreciated the good intentions behind her reaching out to me, that did not diminish the potential harm and anxiety called by her disregard for my no-contact request. She did not respond to my request for a phone call with my advocate present, so my advocate pressed her on that. The interim president then decided to decline my phone call request, even though she had gone out of her way to call me directly and had in her initial email said she was open to a call.
My advocate concisely summarized our interactions with the interim president in an article for The Mennonite:
EMU reaches out again
Later in the summer of 2016 I received an invitation from the head of EMU’s counseling department to participate in a task force approved by the interim president that would focus on best practices for addressing campus sexual violence. There was no explanation for why I was invited to be part of this task force. I can only surmise that it was due to my post on Our Stories Untold.
The goal of this short-term task force was to “create a multi-stakeholder platform” whose “primary focus is to organize best practice knowledge by discussing, exploring and recommending a list of actions for our campus that would be considered best practices that somehow balance out legal, federal, safety, and relational needs.” The invitation clearly stated that “This is NOT a group focusing on cases, investigations or personal or professional concerns about actions taken. We will only focus on best practices.”
While I was grateful to receive this invitation I also had a lot of reservations about it. Yes, I wanted to do what I could to hold EMU accountable and ensure the institution creates better practices, and yet if I accepted the invitation I would be on a task force with some of the folks who had failed me when I was a student, folks who had never apologized for that. I was also frustrated by the sole and narrow focus on best practices because it felt like the conversation was ignoring the personal experiences of people and focusing on the intellectual. It felt like another example of EMU intentionally silencing survivors when our experiences should have been integral to the process.
I wrote the head of counseling a letter through my advocate, detailing my thoughts and reservations about participating in this task force. I expressed my gratitude for being invited in to this process as well as my hope for EMU in initiating a process like this. I went on to say that I assumed they invited me to participate because someone read my OSU post and, if they did, they would see that EMU did not handle my situation in a healthy, supportive, or constructive way:
I also outlined that, in order for me to feel safe and supported in participating, I would need recognition from EMU that they read and understood the gravity of my experience at EMU (both the assault and EMU’s response to it), and I would need a formal apology from EMU with a commitment from the university to do better in the future. I also wanted to know who the task force’s recommendations would be presented to, what responsibility and power those individuals would have in carrying out these recommendations, and what power the task force had to hold the institution accountable for delivering on the recommendations.
The head of counseling thanked me for my honest and open response and then proposed that I visit campus with my advocate to have face to face conversations with key administrators. This was in the early fall of 2016. A few months earlier, EMU had invited two other alums to campus for a day of conversation after they wrote an open letter critical of EMU’s response to allegations of abuse against university VP, Luke Hartman. The head of counseling wondered if that could happen here too. She made it clear that she couldn’t guarantee the outcome but that she would try to advocate for conditions that would make the meeting a good experience for me. She also recognized that neither my advocate nor I lived near campus and that if I accepted her invitation to come to campus EMU would need to cover our gas and lodging costs.
Planning my visit to campus
I agreed to come to a campus visit under several conditions. First, to ensure as safe an environment as possible, I would set terms and parameters for the conversation including what I wanted the freedom to say, what I would like to hear from folks present, and what topics or questions I would not be willing to discuss during the conversation. If folks could agree with these terms, they would confirm with my advocate and indicate their understanding that breaking these terms may lead to my advocate asking them to leave the room.
Secondly, I requested flexibility in the schedule as these conversations can be emotionally taxing.
Finally, I asked for EMU to take an action of good faith prior to my trip to show that the university is capable and willing to follow through on its words with meaningful action. One of the elements of my experience of betrayal at EMU was that that good, warm words spoken by authority figures were not accompanied by action needed to actually protect me or hold the person who assaulted me accountable. I was aware that there was a risk my visit to campus could be, yet again, all talk and no action and I did not want to put myself through that again.
I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of good faith action to request as I wanted to make sure my request would be feasible for the university yet significant and meaningful for me. I expressed that I wanted to propose a feasible action also because I didn’t want the good faith action to be rejected and, thus, eliminate the possibility of a campus visit and conversation.
The head of counseling suggested the following as a potential act of good faith:
While I felt it was certainly important for EMU to make this kind of information centralized and accessible to survivors, I also felt that me presenting a request for the university to do so as my good faith action didn’t require much of EMU. Much of what was described was already a part of EMU’s regular, Title IX-informed procedure. Asking EMU to do something it already intended to do would not demonstrate a commitment from EMU to listen to survivors and take action based on their input.
After much thought, I decided to ask EMU to make a blanket invitation, issued across all Mennonite press and local media, for any survivors of sexual violence and/or abuse at EMU, regardless of how long ago it was, to post their stories (anonymously or with names) on a web platform (such as Our Stories Untold, something like Callisto, or another platform of EMU’s own choosing), giving survivors the opportunity to respond to the questions such as the following:
- What was your experience of sexual abuse at EMU?
- Did you report the abuse at the time? If yes, who did you report to and did you feel your report was handled appropriately?
- Would you like to have further follow up from EMU about what happened? If yes, what would be a meaningful way for EMU to respond to victims?
- Do you have specific recommendations for how EMU policy or protocol should change regarding sexual abuse?
For the system to have integrity it would need to be public (or, at least, without the possibility of survivors’ stories being tampered with) and/or operated under the direction of survivor advocates. I conveyed that I recognized there were details that would need to be thought out carefully in terms of how survivor stories are received. As long as survivor advocates were involved I was happy for these details to be worked out among those implementing the process.
This act of good faith would show that, in inviting me to campus for conversation, EMU was demonstrating that the school desires to listen to survivors, hear their experiences and offer support on a number of levels. The action I proposed was one I felt would demonstrate genuineness on EMU’s part. Following through on the proposed action would be a step that EMU could take that would show that EMU’s desire to talk with me indeed translates into a larger commitment to hear and support survivors who have experienced sexualized violence at EMU. It would show that EMU wasn’t inviting me to campus in the hopes that saying kind words to my face would pacify me and I would then stop speaking about my experience and criticizing EMU publicly.
I received a response at the end of October 2016 through the head of counseling that the interim president felt my requests were viable and would help EMU gather good information. The interim president also acknowledged that meeting these requests would take time and, since her interim appointment at EMU ended with the fall 2016 semester, she could not promise what the outcome would be beyond that date. She did, however, offer to meet with me at the end of the semester anyway. I declined the request as it did not meet my need for a demonstrated act of good faith before my campus visit. The head of counseling acknowledged as much in her email, for which I was grateful.
Chapel
That same week, I received an invitation from the head of counseling to participate in the November 4, 2016 Take Back the Night chapel service via an open letter. The theme was Fractured Trust: Broken People, Broken Community, and the organizers were planning to read two open letters – one from survivors to the community and one from the community to survivors. I was one of several survivors chapel planners reached out to for the project.
I decided to participate and sent the following:
The head of counseling responded and said they couldn’t use the whole thing, which I had expected. But the paired down version she suggested lost some of the key elements of my story, in particular how EMU had broken my trust and failed me. So, after some back and forth with editing, this is what went into the chapel service:
The head of counseling sent me a recording so I could listen to the service but I have not been able to bring myself to. The wound caused by EMU is still too raw.
Sexual assault policy
The next time I heard from EMU was in May 2017 when the head of counseling asked if I would be interested in reviewing EMU’s new draft policy and procedures involving Title IX and sexual assault. The document was long and technical and even in the first few pages I found problematic language. While I was grateful to be offered the chance to review the document, I also felt that I didn’t have the energy to do so. I also felt that, in some ways, it was not my responsibility to hold EMU’s hand through this process; it needed to step up and do the difficult work itself. In the end, I declined the invitation to give feedback but my advocate was able to give some of her own feedback as a survivor and a survivor advocate.
In the beginning of June 2017, the head of counseling thanked us for the emotional energy and time we put into responding. She also communicated that EMU’s new president was getting up to speed on the planning for my visit, processing everything that was discussed, consulting with someone for advice, and would then follow up.
What about that campus visit?
In October 2017, I reached out to my advocate to see if she heard any news from EMU’s new president regarding my visit. She had not so she scheduled a phone call with the president for early November. The president communicated that EMU was interested in continuing to work toward me holding a campus visit and felt my requests and parameters were reasonable. Since she really didn’t know anything about my process with EMU over the last year and a half or my story, my advocate asked her to read my story on OSU and watch my video. While communicating about the act of good faith I requested, the president kept referring to EMU’s new sexual violence policy as something EMU had recently done that could maybe fulfill my request. Revisiting the policy was a good step for EMU to take, but it was not at all what I was requesting.
The president wasn’t necessarily closed to the idea of EMU inviting survivors to come forward with their experiences but she would need to think about it. She also emailed my advocate links to EMU’s new policy and procedures and a description of the changes the school went through over the previous year, even though we had explained that these did not amount to what we meant by an act of good faith.
In late November 2017, the president’s office communicated what EMU envisioned as far as an act of good faith:
- “bringing you [Hilary] and MG out here at our expense;
- connecting the lessons we’ve learned from her story to stimulate others on our campus (faculty, staff and students) to come forward– naming safe options for that– as a preview to our university climate survey that will be administered in Spring of 2018.”
My advocate responded by reiterating my initial requests in 2016, including that the act of good faith was something I needed to generate and have EMU agree to. The act I had proposed was that EMU would put out an invitation via major Mennonite media platforms for anyone who had experienced sexual violence at EMU to come forward to independent survivor networks or support teams (i.e. Collins Center if they are willing to collaborate with the initiative, FaithTrust if they are willing to collaborate, Into Account, Our Stories Untold, and there may be other possibilities we don’t know about as well). The invitation would need to be accompanied by a commitment from EMU to listen and somehow constructively/ethically hold and honor any reports that do come in. My advocate reiterated that I was not sure whether or not this action was still the most appropriate one, but that I still wanted to hear from EMU whether it was a feasible one.
Money matters & the good faith action
In January of 2018, the president’s office communicated that EMU would like to use money they received from a Department of Justice grant to fund my campus visit. They wanted to know if I would agree. At this point, they had not yet responded to Hilary’s multiple emails asking for a clear response to my request for a good faith action. Upon further conversation with EMU, I found out that participating in the grant would delay my campus visit by at least another nine months. I was already exhausted. I needed this thing to be over. It wouldn’t have been healthy for me to wait, so I said no. I didn’t want to participate in the grant. I wanted my visit to happen before the end of the spring 2018 semester. Apparently, I learned at that point, EMU was in financial straits and could not afford to pay for me and my advocate’s visit without this grant. My advocate reminded EMU that it was they who extended this invitation to me in the first place, that funding the trip was always a part of EMU’s offer, and that EMU’s financial situation with respect to this offer it made to me of its own volition was not in any way my responsibility.
In this whole exchange about the timing of my visit, Hilary kept insisting on a direct answer to my request for a good faith action. EMU finally responded:
It was clear, then, that EMU was not willing to move forward with the good faith action that I had requested. Their answer suggested that they also failed to ever fully understand my request, since I had said from day one that a thorough plan for following up on survivors’ statements would need to be a part of the action. Though EMU was open to discussing a different good faith action, the actual process by which any comparable action would be taken continued to be unclear. When we pressed for specifics about how the good faith action and details of my visit would be worked out with respect to the grant, they weren’t available:
“At this point in time,” our EMU contact said, “the strategic planning committee has not met so I really have no specifics to offer.”
Stepping away
After two years of back and forth with this process where my advocate and I had to continually reach out to them to keep the process going, EMU was suddenly expressing a sense of urgency and neglecting the critical parameters I had been working on all along. Without the act of good faith I could not determine if EMU was serious about working with survivors and if I could once again put my trust in people at the institution that failed me so greatly in the past. At my request, my advocate consulted with some of her advocate colleagues about whether or not I should move forward with the visit. I asked for their advice as advocates because I feared for my safety and emotional and mental wellbeing if I participated. They all thought that EMU had proved itself untrustworthy in this process and were concerned that EMU’s lack of respect, lack of ownership of the harm caused to me, and lack of attention to the boundaries I have been setting will only be amplified if I were to meet with these folks in person at that time. My advocate reiterated that she would fully support me in whatever I chose to do, a support that I have felt and continue to feel after all these many months.
In the end, after two years of energy, time, and back and forth, I decided to pull back from the process. Here is part of the email my advocate sent to EMU detailing why:
“MG would like to communicate that she makes this decision with a fair amount of frustration and disappointment. What she most wanted was for EMU’s invitation to be a sign that EMU was ready to make amends for the ways the school failed her when she was a student. What she has experienced since receiving EMU’s invitation, however, has demonstrated that this is not the case.
Instead, EMU has continued to earn her distrust by:
- Calling her directly, early on, when she had asked only to be contacted through her chosen advocate;
- Frequently failing to offer direct responses to her questions;
- Drawing out this emotionally taxing process for two years when the original idea was that a visit to campus would happen within a couple months of the invitation being made;
- Repeatedly failing for long periods of time to follow up as promised;
- Several times resuming the process after long delays only when prompted by me at MG’s request;
- Repeatedly forgetting or ignoring important parts of her requests and priorities previously discussed at length;
- Turning down her proposed good faith action without offering, as requested, any feedback on what EMU might be willing to offer by way of a different good faith action;
- Wavering on the original commitment made to MG by not planning financially for the visit EMU invited;
- Attempting to delay her visit again due to EMU’s failure to budget for it;
- Failing throughout this process to consistently demonstrate trauma awareness, appropriate boundaries, understanding of sexual violence and its repercussions, and respect for MG and other survivors.
I realize you will likely take issue with some of this, but it is nonetheless important to understand and take seriously that this is how a survivor who experienced serious harm as a student at EMU, and who entered this process hopeful for some degree of reconciliation with EMU, has experienced her interaction with the current administration.
A further reason that MG’s trust in EMU has not been earned in this process that she is aware that as EMU has pursued this process of potential righting of wrongs with her, other EMU students reporting abuse have continued to have damaging experiences in their own processes of reporting – experiences that mirror MG’s original harmful experience of reporting to the university.
Because EMU has not been appropriately respectful of MG or adequately committed to its responsibility to do right by her in this process as it has been undertaken at a distance, she has decided it is likely that these dynamics will only become amplified if she were to meet with EMU administrators in person. Thus, out of respect for herself and a desire not to experience further harm, she has made the difficult decision not to visit.
It has been a difficult decision because the process of accepting that EMU is still not ready or willing to do right by her revives the pain of the original betrayal she experienced from the university. The hope she put these last two years into the idea that EMU would now choose solidarity with her and other survivors has been costly.”
Lessons: Survivors need more than good intentions
It’s been a long decade: ten long years of processing a sexual assault, failings by an institution that should have protected and advocated for me, a subsequent suicide attempt, and waves of depression, exhaustion, and anger. The last two years have, in some ways, felt just as long with the whiplash of this process with EMU, oscillating between hope and possibility and disappointment and broken promises.
I want EMU to do better. I want EMU to be better. And I want to believe that both these things are possible. I had hoped that I could help the institution get there. But right now it is not my time and it might never be. But I hope to God there is someone out there who can create this change. I won’t give up hope that easily.
Megan welcomes your words of support. She requests that anyone who would like to send her words of support or otherwise contact her regarding what she has shared here do so through OSU Director and Into Account advocate Hilary J. Scarsella: hjscarsella@intoaccount.org. Outside of leaving comments below, please do not attempt to contact Megan directly.