Nine days ago, I stood in Elkhart, Indiana, on the campus of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS). The campus apartment building where I was sexually assaulted is gone now. When I learned that it would be demolished, I remember wishing that I could be the one to swing the wrecking ball.

Soft, green grass now grows in the place where my life broke apart. Nine days ago, with two of my fiercest supporters at my sides, I set my gaze there for just a fragment of a moment. I expected to feel sick at the sight, but the nausea didn’t come. Instead, I was visited by an image of today’s students finding rest on the lawn, studying in the sun. I felt warmly toward them. I sensed the roots of the gentle grass working through the ground, turning it over, reinfusing that once-terrible place with the capacity to grow something different.

I was on campus to meet both with the seminary personnel who were involved in administratively responding to my original disclosure of sexual assault, and those members of AMBS’s faculty and staff who led this last year’s process of reviewing that response.

These meetings were the culmination of the review process. I arrived on campus knowing already that the seminary had corroborated my account, that they agreed that the original administrative response to my disclosure was unacceptable, and that they wanted to do right this time around.

I spoke the words I needed to speak. I asked the questions I needed to ask. I received sincere apologies and admissions of failure from everyone with whom I met. We talked logistics for next steps. We discussed needed improvements to the seminary’s sexual misconduct policies and procedures.  

Nine days is not enough time for me to process the complexity or significance of these events. It is certainly not enough time for me to craft and share words that represent that complexity and significance in writing.

But this is real life, and there are time constraints that have led me to try to do my best anyway. The current AMBS president will leave that position at the end of the month. She has been integral to this last year’s process of acknowledgement, accountability, and restitution. My Into Account colleague and advocate through this process, Stephanie Krehbiel, said it well: “This would not have happened without the outgoing AMBS president, Sara Wenger Shenk. She was our main contact person throughout this process, and she led her colleagues into accountability in a way I’ve never seen in any other higher ed administrator. She was respectful, patient, and trauma-informed. She took this process seriously, and without any fanfare whatsoever, at nearly every juncture and potential crisis point, she followed Hilary’s lead.”

It seems right that news of the process I have pursued with AMBS these last 15 months be released before President Wenger Shenk transitions out of her role. Her presence on campus is important as people in the seminary and broader community learn of and begin to wrestle with what is, for them, likely new and alarming information.

The remainder of what you read here, thus, will not read smooth. It is a collection of five disparate impressions and thoughts still in gestation. Those of you who are with me – really with me – I invite you to pick up where I leave off and forge ahead. Dance with what’s here, make it your own, advocate for me and for you and for all the people who need the church and the academy to get it fully together with respect to sexual violence.

This is a team effort. I’m tagging you in.

 

One: Success is a thing that exists and is possible.

In the spring of 2018 I asked AMBS to review its administrative response to my disclosure of sexual violence when I was a student, and they did. I claimed that my 2010 disclosure was mishandled, and AMBS agreed. I asked for in-person meetings with and apologies from representatives of the seminary and from the people who mishandled my original disclosure. The meetings were arranged and the apologies were offered. I asked for a public institutional acknowledgement and apology, and AMBS gave it. I asked AMBS to stand with me in my decision to publicly release this statement you are reading and my account of the original injury. The seminary volunteered its support.

Through the duration of these last 15 months, the terms of confidentiality I asked for were granted. The boundaries I set for my own wellbeing through this process were respected. I was consulted at each step. As far as I know, no action was taken or disclosure made without my knowledge and approval. I experienced communication from the AMBS personnel reviewing my case as respectful and professional, even (and especially) when we hit snags that needed to be worked through. There was no victim-blaming. Defensiveness was at a minimum. AMBS personnel who had access to records that could corroborate my account volunteered those records even when doing so ran against their own immediate self-interest. AMBS offered to reimburse me (and those who accompanied me) for the cost of traveling to the seminary for our in-person meetings. The AMBS personnel who participated in this process recognized and voluntarily affirmed that by coming forward I was giving them an opportunity to learn, make amends, and improve. They expressed gratitude to me for this opportunity, and I took that gratitude to be sincere.

I am under no illusion that this process was perfect, and I will discuss one concern that remains for me in a moment. But this process was a good one. It went as well as I dared to hope it might.

My takeaway?

Success is possible. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines (like these, or these, or these, or these), but institutions can nondefensively admit failure. Leaders of religious and academic institutions can, without being experts in sexual violence themselves, engage survivors respectfully, appropriately, and without endangering or retraumatizing them. Survivors’ preferences and choices regarding institutional processes of review, accountability, and restitution can be accommodated. Those individuals who mishandle a survivor’s case can take responsibility for doing so. The failures of these individual personnel can be owned by the institution as manifestations of the institution’s broader failures as a collective. Rather than proposing that the confusion and complexity that accompanies any instance of sexual violence justifies administrative failure, religious and academic leaders can take responsibility for having navigated that confusion and complexity poorly. It is possible for religious communities, academic communities, and their institutions to get through an entire process of negotiation with a survivor of sexual violence without criticizing that survivor for talking out loud or on social media about their experiences of violence and betrayal.

Religious and academic institutions that have enabled or intensified the traumatic burden that sexual violence survivors carry can choose to take back the weight of that burden that is theirs – and not ours – to hold.

So, no more excuses. Next time your Christian college, your pastor, your professor, your conference minister, your bishop, your dean, your denomination tells you they’ve done everything they can to take survivors’ voices seriously, tells you how hard it is to please survivors who are so demanding, tells you these specific survivors are too caught up in their pain to be reasonable, tells you that the survivors who keep clamoring for change are projecting their suffering in ways that threaten to ruin the reputations of good people who were doing their best…

Shake your head, cover your ears, and back away slowly.

That shit is toxic.

As I have said elsewhere, I posed to AMBS every demand that my Into Account clients who are sexual violence survivors pose to the institutions that betrayed them. I spoke in the same demeanor. I insisted on the same forms of acknowledgement and restitution. I have no less rage than the next survivor, no more right to respect. And, here I am talking about all of it on the internet.

If AMBS can pull off a process with me that I feel free to call a success, none of the rest of the church-related or academic institutions out there can justify offering survivors who confront them anything less. Here is living proof that institutions can deliver on what survivors are asking for. It can be done. It’s on you – church, community, and academic leaders – to get it done.

 

Two: Grief.

I could play up the success of the process I pursued this last year with AMBS in hopes that a jubilant affect would inspire its repetition at other schools with other survivors. I do hope other institutions decide to follow AMBS’s lead. But I’d also like to be honest with you.

I’m exhausted.

I feel sad.

I am grieving.

I’m grieving for all the survivors whose attempts to pursue similar processes are painfully rebuffed by the institutions that failed them. I’m grieving especially for certain Into Account clients who are this minute giving everything they’ve got to negotiate against tough odds for even minimal steps toward transparency and accountability, let alone restitution from the religious and academic institutions that enabled and covered up their abuse. I am grieving for one former client of mine who, like me, put over a year’s worth of energy into working with her Christian college toward exactly the same end that I requested from AMBS for exactly the same reasons. Except her efforts came to naught. The school didn’t cooperate. The success of the process I pursued with AMBS throws a light on the landscape of institutional accountability in the wake of sexual violence. I have arrived in this strange land of success only to find that it is home to a ghost town. There is no one else here. Or, at least, there are too many who have been denied entry.

I am also grieving, newly, for what I lost ten years ago when I was assaulted and nine years ago when I disclosed the assault to AMBS. I lost my friends, my community, my feeling of belonging, my sense of self, of safety, of sanity. I lost the ability to trust my own perception of reality. I lost faith in the integrity of my memory. I am grieving the years – yes, years – I spent wracked with fear that I was, at my core, exactly what Z said I was: frightening. I am grieving the loss of countless nights’ sleep. All the hundreds and thousands of hours I spent managing post-traumatic stress, fear, and anxiety when I could have put that energy into writing, publishing, playing with my niece, or, hell, just going about the daily routine of my life without the constant intrusion of a terror that will not let go.

I am able, at last, to grieve what I lost years ago because the world outside of me has finally acknowledged that those losses are real.

 

Three: Reality confirmation and narrative restitution

The assault I experienced as a seminary student is not my only experience of sexual violence. Not by a long shot. But its impact was, hands down, the most devastating. There are a few reasons for that. The one community in the world that I thought was safe – that of my peace church – turned out not to be. The moral, academic, and religious authorities in my life reflected my experience of sexual violence back to me as if it was not violence. My attempts to find theological resources within my faith tradition (and at my seminary) that could help me make sense of what was happening failed almost completely. I studied, worked, and lived for years in incredibly close proximity to my rapist. I watched my faith community bless him for church leadership. My experience of sexual assault and institutional betrayal touched every part of my daily existence and tangled up all of my resources for making meaning in my life.

But I think the biggest reason that this assault so powerfully blew apart my life was that my community’s failure to acknowledge that what I experienced was sexual assault repeated Z’s denial that he had done anything wrong.

I have been staring at this line on my screen for days, trying to figure out how to convey what I want to say here. I’m not convinced that I’ve been successful, but here’s what I’ve got:

Sexual violence turns reality inside out. This assault destroyed all of my knowledge about myself. I did not know if I had been raped or if I had become a monster. I had no resources whatsoever to weigh the legitimacy of Z’s version of reality against mine. And because AMBS responded to my disclosure in a way that silenced the part of me struggling to advocate for myself, increased my self-doubt, and enabled our community to go on thinking that Z was fit for religious scholarship and ministry, the world I have lived in these last ten years has been one organized by the version of reality that killed me. Existing in this world leaves me split down the middle.

That is why I asked AMBS to stand with me in my decision to publish my account of what happened when I was a student. That is why I asked AMBS to make its present acknowledgement of failure and apology to me public. These are acts that I have been describing as narrative restitution. Through them, public knowledge shifts. The narratives that structure my daily experience in the communities that AMBS and I share shift. Reality shifts. I no longer feel split between worlds.

Restitution is usually conceived in financial terms. It recognizes that violence has a material impact that puts people who are victimized or oppressed at serious and unjust disadvantage. The purpose of financial restitution is to redistribute material resources in such a way that the impact of that disadvantage is mitigated. In that way, restitution is about shifting power dynamics. But in the context of sexual violence, narrative is power. Narrative has a material impact.

By issuing public acknowledgement of AMBS’s failures, by clearly and unequivocally apologizing to me through its official communications platform, and by publicly standing with me in the release of my narrative of sexual assault and institutional betrayal, AMBS has offered me narrative restitution.

There are no words for what this means to me. For my gratitude. For the life it gives back to me. For how deeply I long for every sexual violence survivor to be offered the same.

 

Three-and-a-half: What felt like chaos truly was chaos.

And the reality confirmation that I experienced in this 15-month process was not limited to AMBS’s formal and public words of affirmation.

I learned in my communications this past year with AMBS personnel that the administrative response to my original disclosure was far more internally disorganized than I had imagined. One person involved in responding to my disclosure was under the impression that I had been given AMBS’s grievance policy, that I read it, and that, having weighed my options, I refused to file a complaint. One person, due to a strange series of outside circumstances, came to believe (and then acted out of the belief) that the assault happened immediately before my disclosure, when it had actually happened a year prior. Whereas I am rock solid certain I was asked to contribute to the cost of hiring Layla and that this request was presented to me as one that AMBS found appropriate, the person involved in my case who most directly represented the institution recalls recommending no such thing. Though Layla tried to prepare me for disappointment leading up to Z’s (non)apology, her AMBS contact somehow came under the impression that the meeting between me and Z went well. I learned that the reason the dean passed me in the halls hundreds of times without ever acknowledging the elephant in the room was that she didn’t know I was the one who was assaulted. Though she had been consulted on how my disclosure should be addressed, the identities of the students involved were not disclosed to her. And, it appears that no one involved in receiving or responding to my disclosure understood themselves to be operating as representatives of the institution.

Y’all. My head is spinning.

As a seminary student (who, at the time, had zero experience in administration), I imagined that AMBS’s administrative and procedural ducks were lined up in a neat and orderly row. I thought each step of AMBS’s response to me was comprehensively discerned by representatives of the school who truly knew what they were doing. That is what made AMBS’s response to me feel authoritative. And the authority of AMBS’s response to me is what weighed so heavily all these years against my internal sense of the legitimacy of my memory, my experience, my sense of reality and ethical integrity. It is both frustrating and validating to learn now that AMBS’s administrative process was not the organized, intentional, informed process I thought it was.

Learning this has been frustrating, because I deserved better. It has been validating, because it affirms that my experience of this original process as chaotic and confusing is a fairly accurate representation of what it was. Now that I know AMBS’s original response to my disclosure was not the organized, deliberate product of ethical reflection and knowledge of sexual violence that I thought it was, I am free to release myself from the idea that this response was an ethically or spiritually authoritative one.

Another reason that the process I pursued with AMBS was a successful one, then, is that AMBS did not try to hide the disorganization of its administrative process from me. They fessed up. They put it all on the table. They were more interested in telling the truth than they were in managing their image.

Four: This thing we did was hard.

Allow me to be honest with you again. I count the process I pursued with AMBS this last year a success, and yet, every second of it was hard.

The years I spent cultivating the courage to confront AMBS were hard. Telling my family was hard. Each step of the last 15 months working with AMBS toward acknowledgement and accountability was hard. The meetings were hard. The waiting was hard. Every email was hard.

I spent days, weeks sometimes, mentally preparing myself to read and respond to emails from AMBS personnel that I knew ahead of time were relatively non-threatening in terms of their content. Even so, the act of reading and responding to a simple logistics email from an institution that compounded the trauma of my assault required me to dwell in the part of my body and mind that holds the anguish of that assault and its mishandling as if it all happened yesterday. Being in that place gives me a sensation like what some feel at the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard or a fork scraping across a plate. I feel it on the top of my head and down through my temples, jaw, and neck. I feel it in my eyes. The feeling makes me want to crinkle my whole body up into the shape of a zigzag. Dwelling in that space, even for a moment, even just to read a benign email, feels like dragging sandpaper across my brain.

Sometimes, that sandpaper was so rough that my mind stopped processing the communications I was getting from AMBS altogether. I remember one occasion in particular, when we were still working out what the parameters of this last year’s process were going to look like, I opened a fairly long and important email and literally was not able to read it. I could see the words. I could say the words. But I could not for the life of me understand what those words meant. I must have read the same sentence fifteen times without a lick of comprehension before I called Into Account Executive Director, Stephanie Krehbiel, who was acting as my advocate, and asked her to read the document and explain it to me.

All of this is to say: Though the process of accountability, acknowledgement, and restitution I pursued with AMBS this last year was, to a significant extent, a success, it was still excruciating.

I don’t say this to discourage other survivors from pursuing a similar path. (Go get it, girl!) I say it to make clear to those who have not experienced sexual violence or institutional betrayal that survivors who ask for institutional or community accountability do so at incredible cost to ourselves no matter how smoothly the process goes.

Understand that. Respect that. Don’t expect us to have a happy affect or a disposition of consistent gratitude toward you just because you are doing your best not to re-injure us after we have already been crushed by a community that you represent. We are tired. We are bearing more weight than our bodies and psyches should be capable of withstanding. Honestly, each one of us is a goddamn miracle. When we invite you into the sacred work of listening to our stories, acknowledging the ways our communities – your communities – have betrayed us, and working toward accountability and restitution, you dishonor this sacred work if, at any point in the process, you lose sight of the fact that we are doing the lion’s share of the labor and that this is thoroughly unjust.

One of the things that made the process I pursued with AMBS work is that those reviewing my case never took issue with my “tone,” never policed my affect, never asked (directly or passive aggressively) that I put more energy into meeting their emotional needs than I volunteered. They knew I was holding up a weight they could not imagine. They acknowledged the incredible energy I was exerting for my own and for our shared community’s benefit. They gave me – in my strength and when I struggled – their unflinching respect.

 

Five: Let’s get this sexual misconduct policy fixed.

I’ve been calling the process I pursued with AMBS this last year a success, and it was.

But I have also mentioned that one at least concern remains, and that concern is AMBS’s sexual misconduct policy.

When I approached AMBS in March of 2018 to ask that the seminary revisit its administrative response to my original disclosure, I asked the seminary to commit not only to doing right by me personally, but to revamping its sexual violence policies and procedures so that what happened to me won’t happen again in the future. Words of acknowledgement and apology are important, but their significance crumbles if they aren’t backed with action and material change. Specifically, then, I asked AMBS to “Make plans to work with a credible, victim-centered, outside consultant to review and revamp the school’s sexual misconduct policy.”

What I heard back was that AMBS had already done a thorough revision of its sexual misconduct policies in the years since I was a student, and that new procedures for preventing and raising awareness around sexual violence had been put in place as well. I was encouraged to consider the possibility that the kinds of changes that would have been necessary during my time as a student had already been implemented.

I felt uneasy about backing off of my request that AMBS work with an outside group to make sure its policies were up to par, but I reasoned that the seminary had just gone through a huge reckoning process with respect to its history of enabling John Howard Yoder’s sexual violence. It made sense to me that AMBS would have taken measures during this time to ensure that its policies were appropriately revised. The person I was communicating with seemed confident that this was the case. I started to feel arrogant and presumptuous for suggesting otherwise, so I agreed to move forward without a commitment that AMBS would revisit its policies again. Instead, we decided that during my in-person meetings with AMBS personnel, one of those meetings would be devoted to discussing AMBS’s current sexual misconduct policies and whether or not continued improvement is needed.

In retrospect, I wish that when I was assured that AMBS’s policies had already been thoroughly improved, I would have read them before withdrawing my request that the seminary submit its policies to an audit. Full disclosure, in my role as Director of Theological Integrity for Into Account, I have conducted policy audits. I wrote about sexual misconduct policies designed for Christian contexts in my dissertation. I have a book project in the (early) works that is policy focused. I know something about what a survivor-centered, effective policy looks like and what it does not. But reading sexual misconduct policies takes an incredible amount of energy. Reading the sexual misconduct policy of the institution that compounded the trauma of my own experience of sexual assault was a task I did not have bandwidth for at the time.

But if I had read AMBS’s policies early on, I would not have agreed to move forward without a commitment from the seminary to contract with survivor-centered experts to redraft them. I have no doubt that the policies AMBS has in place now are a substantial improvement over those that existed when I was a student. I want to commend and hug every person who put time and energy into updating them.

And.

The need for continued improvement is urgent.

Stephanie said it well: “Around the North American Mennonite world, AMBS has been recognized as a model of accountability for their institutional ownership of the serial sexual abuse perpetrated by John Howard Yoder on their watch. But their policy, despite the improvements they’ve made, is deeply flawed and desperately in need of expert-led improvements. We do not plan to be silent about that. This is [the] epicenter of Mennonite pastoral training in North America, and their failures in relation to sexual violence reverberate in countless lives. They have to fix this.”

This is not the place to dig deep into policy details, but suffice it to say that if the assault I experienced ten years ago happened today, I would not be able to use AMBS’s current policy to report it. For one, the policy stipulates that reports must be made within 180 days of the event’s occurrence. It took me twice that long to garner the courage, resources, and presence of mind to disclose my experience of sexual assault on campus. The policy’s framing of consent does not account for the role that alcohol and drugs play in limiting the possibility of consent. Against the rules of Title IX (according to the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter), and against the ethical consensus among sexual violence experts, AMBS’s current policy provides mediation as an option for adjudicating sexual harassment, including particularly dangerous manifestations of sexual harassment like stalking.

In my early June meetings with AMBS personnel, Stephanie and I spoke to additional areas of needed policy revision for an hour. The meeting ended because our allotted time was up, not because we had run out of feedback to give.

I was nervous to speak forthrightly in this meeting because I was afraid that expressing criticism of AMBS’s sexual misconduct policy would jeopardize the progress we had made through the previous 15 months, progress that in that moment felt both fragile and precious to me. However, each time I hesitated, the AMBS personnel I was meeting with made it clear that they welcomed and even coveted my honest feedback.

I do not believe that the inadequacy of AMBS’s current policy is the result of ill-intention or failure to want to have good policies. As far as I can tell, the people I met with both want AMBS’s sexual misconduct policy to be great and have put in real effort toward that end.

The problem is a lack of expertise.

And that is why I remain convinced that the best next step for AMBS is to make an executable plan to have an outside, survivor-centered group with policy knowledge and sexual violence expertise audit and revise its policies and procedures around sexual violence.

 

Here is where I need your help.

AMBS has publicly affirmed that its policies need work. I received verbal confirmation in my campus meetings that AMBS is committed to improving them. What we don’t know is how those improvements will be made. Realistically, AMBS probably needs a minute to figure that out. We did just meet 9 days ago.

But encouragement can’t hurt. If you want to support me, if you want to support survivors, if you want to support AMBS’s efforts to become a seminary that has its act together with respect to sexual violence, contact AMBS and let them know this matters to you. Students, faculty, alumni, professional colleagues, Mennonites, church members: tell the folks at AMBS who make the decisions that this matters to you, and tell them why. Tell them you want to see the seminary’s sexual misconduct policies revised under the oversight of survivor-centered professionals. Tell them you want this to be a priority.

And then support the people at AMBS who are making it their priority to get this done. Find out who they are. Tell them they are doing the Lord’s work. Ask them how you can help. Bring them cookies.

Once the sweets have been delivered, if you’re feeling really committed to the cause: Give AMBS money to make this happen.

Donors, I’m looking at you. This work takes money. Sexual violence prevention professionals have to eat. And the knowledge that they have is worth your financial investment. So, call up AMBS’s money people, call the president, call the dean, and work out a way to donate specifically in support of AMBS contracting with survivor-centered sexual violence experts to get this policy work done.

This, dear readers, is the end I want to my story (to all of our stories). Material change that makes us better at addressing sexual violence and helps to prevent continued repetition of the nightmares too many of us have lived.

Remember, this is a team effort, and I’m tagging you in.