Our rock is the truth

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018

by Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director

It began with an email that several faculty members from a small liberal arts college shared with me. It was from their school’s Title IX Coordinator, shared with all faculty and staff of their school, informing them about the school’s mandatory reporting policy* for sexual violence. The pitch of the letter was pretty simple: “If you see something, YOU MUST REPORT. If you hear something, YOU MUST REPORT. If a student tells you something, YOU MUST REPORT.” That was the message to faculty and staff.

“Does this seem right to you?” they asked me.

***

One challenge with working in sexual violence advocacy in 2018 is that no matter what specific thing I’m trying to get done, 2018 just keeps happening. 2018 is the gift that won’t stop giving. As I processed my thoughts about that email and its injunctions, the backdrop was the brutal spectacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the public treatment of the women who came forward with stories about their experiences with Kavanaugh’s sexual violence.

On the subject of reporting sexual violence, let me speak briefly about what has been done to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who truly had no good options. Her anonymous report to her congresswoman was leaked and ultimately reported by The Intercept; she came forward with her name only when it became clear to her that nothing meaningful would happen if she didn’t. She also came forward because she felt a responsibility to do so. She wanted to prevent further harm being done. In that latter quality, she reminds me of just about every survivor who has ever come to Into Account for help.

I saw that he had this job with kids and I knew he was going to hurt them.

I knew if I didn’t say something and he raped again, it would be on me.

I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

Ultimately, Ford testified in front of the Senate—and the American public—with far fewer legal and personal protections in place than would be tolerable in a courtroom, despite the attempts of her lawyers to secure them for her. And at the end of that, the Senate demonstrated how little they cared by burning through every chance for investigation and due process and confirming Kavanaugh anyway. The outcome she risked her life to prevent came to pass, and her life is still at risk.

Americans have endlessly debated her credibility. Her personal life has been made public. She receives hate mail and death threats, and at such a volume that she and her family have essentially been forced into hiding. Her story and her personhood have been cruelly mocked from pulpits, in news rooms, and most shamefully, by the sexual predator who currently occupies the Oval Office.

The collective laughter of vicious boys and men, the thing that Ford has testified most powerfully marked her trauma, is haunting all of us right now. My own survivor trauma involves such laughter. I was a child, and the boys who assaulted me were my age, not more than seven or eight. My memory is patchy and I have no clean narrative of these incidents. But I have clear memories of the laughter, of how amused they were by my anger and my efforts to fight them off. Indelible in the hippocampus.

***

Reporting doesn’t put a stop to the laughter. Ask Christine Blasey Ford. Ask some of our clients. Ask any woman who has gone public and then endured the taunting of men who debate the veracity of her story by assessing her perceived physical attractiveness.

There’s the laughter, and then there’s the outrage, the how dare she. Ford has been accused of ruining Kavanaugh’s life, of inventing her story to serve a nefarious political agenda. She’s been called a liar, but by the insidious abuser logic that grips so much of our public discourse, she’s also been accused of making too much out of a thing that may well have happened but that she should have gotten over. It didn’t happen, but if it did happen, it wasn’t a big deal. She’s a liar, but if she’s not a liar, she’s being oversensitive. Legions of conservative white women on social media endeavored to be offended by her on behalf of their boys and men, whose lives, they speculated, could be so easily ruined by conniving women like Dr. Ford. At the reeking floor of this cultural cesspit is the assertion that all boys do this, all men do this, and it’s the job of the rest of us to put up with it. If we can’t, there’s something wrong with us.

The day of Ford’s testimony, one of our former clients posted her story on social media, about her sexually abusive ex-boyfriend, whom she reported through a university Title IX process:

People I had always liked and admired, people I thought were decent and level headed, sided with my ex. I was “crazy”, “wanted to ruin his life”, and “why hadn’t I said anything earlier”?

It was devastating. I had been taken to the court of public opinion, then executed in the town square. Of course, some people did ask for my side of the story, and it was exhausting to have to retell and relive my personal hell over and over again. But I did it, I felt like I needed to.

So often, when we report, when we come forward, this is how it goes. Yet we’re told that we must report. The responsible thing to do is report. If we report, people can do something about it, and if we don’t report, we can’t blame people for doing nothing.

We’re told that it’s our responsibility to make people do something other than nothing. For that, we should be willing to risk being blamed for everything.

***

Which brings me back to that Title IX email. Which I hated.

It’s not that the policy itself was a surprise to me. I’m used to dealing with reporting policies like this, and they’re not the fault of the relatively inexperienced Title IX coordinator who wrote this email. She may well have had the fear of God put into her about the school’s vulnerability to lawsuits, should they not be able to prove that they are receptive to reports of campus sexual assault. At colleges and universities across the U.S., policies that require all personnel to report any suspected sexual violence to the school’s Title IX Coordinator have become standard. In defiance of the accumulated wisdom of professional victim advocacy in the fields of sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence prevention, these policies require such reporting regardless of the actual wishes of victims.

I’ll put this in the starkest terms I can think of. Imagine you are a trusted faculty or staff member for a student who confides in you that her boyfriend is hitting her and raping her. She wants to leave him, but he’s threatened to kill her if she does. Like many abusers, he has isolated her from her friends and family, and she doesn’t know who she can trust. She’s terrified, and she needs to talk through her options with someone who can help her find resources without triggering an administrative process that she could lose control of.

This is a student whose life is in danger. This is a student who desperately needs help that doesn’t strip away her own agency or decision-making power. She likely knows better than anybody else what actions–her own or the school’s–might set off a fatal response from her abuser. This is a student that a lot of empathic women faculty have had in their offices. This is not an occasion for YOU MUST REPORT. It is unconscionable to ask a faculty or staff person sitting in front of such a student to make a choice between risking that student’s life and risking their own job.

Contrary to popular belief, federal law doesn’t technically require these blanket reporting policies. Reporting campus sexual violence involves two broad areas of relevant law: one is civil rights law (Title IX) and one is campus safety law (Clery Act). Title IX regulations require mandatory reporting from “responsible employees,” a category whose federal definition is so ambiguous as to almost be circular. The Clery Act requires it from “campus security authorities.” For a variety of reasons–the ambiguity in these categories, for instance, and the newly vast for-profit industry of products aimed at helping campuses achieve compliance with these federal laws–blanket mandatory reporting policies have become the default setting in higher education, even though they are not legally required.

I’ve read and heard many perspectives on these policies from people in academia. They aren’t popular policies with faculty, for instance. I have faculty friends who routinely receive reports of sexual or domestic violence and flat-out refuse to comply with the mandate to forward these reports to their Title IX office, because these faculty friends cannot in good conscience take away a victim’s agency and would rather risk their jobs. I’ve also heard multiple people–people who are probably less likely to receive reports of sexual violence–refer to these policies as a “sex panic.”

But this isn’t a sex panic. It’s a liability panic. From a legal perspective, blanket mandatory reporting policies at higher ed institutions make perfect sense. The most cynical interpretation, which I believe is operative on some level in pretty much every institution that has these policies, is that the policies help to legally absolve schools of responsibility for any sexual violence that isn’t officially reported, while at the same time making it less likely that survivors will talk about sexual violence at all.

YOU MUST REPORT. If you don’t, that says, you’re not our problem.

***

In the weeks after the client I quoted above went forward with her report of her abuser, the blowback against her was gut-wrenchingly awful. This is when my fortitude as an advocate is always tested: I see the suffering of our clients at the outcome of an action they’ve taken, and I fight off the temptation to fantasize about omnipotence. If I indulge that fantasy, then I can believe that there might have been an alternative I could have encouraged that would lead to justice without all the trauma. I wish I could learn how to be a better advocate from that fantasy, but I know I can’t.

I remember one particular phone conversation with this client and Into Account co-founder Jay Yoder. Jay recounted to her the mantra that carried Jay through a similarly grueling period of communal attacks. It went like this: What happened is real. What happened is true. I am standing on a rock, and that rock is the truth.

It’s this mantra I come back to when I sit in the pain of all my collected experiences and observations about what happens after survivors come forward, whether through formal processes or informal disclosure. There is all that pain, and then there is the reality that I still want survivors to speak, when they can. I still want survivors to come forward and say what has happened to them.

Because truth is a rock. That’s why. Not because I believe that individual survivors bear the responsibility to protect their communities from their perpetrators, or because I believe that the legal and bureaucratic processes available to survivors are truly designed to produce justice. It’s not because I believe I can save anyone from the re-traumatization that these processes so frequently deliver.

It’s because I’ve seen the power of the truth to heal. Lies may spread like wildfire, but truth is like a geological miracle. When survivors tell the truth about what happened to them, even as the flames burn around them, they’re standing on rocks that are expanding, searching, merging. Our rocks become a mountain range. We become summits, together.

I categorically refuse to concede the power inherent in the truth. I can’t control any community’s collective denial about its own sickness. But I can stand with you on your rock. I can bring you water. If you’re too tired to stand, or don’t have standing legs, we’ll sit. If you need to lie on the ground, we’ll lie on the ground. We’ll feel the solidity beneath us. We won’t know what comes next, but that’s okay. That’s the way of things.

What we will know, what I will remind you of when you need to hear it, is that all of our truths together have more power than we can fathom.

*What we call “mandatory reporting” at a college or university is materially different from mandatory reporting laws for child abuse. When you are a mandatory reporter as a result of a job that puts you in regular contact with children, you’re legally obligated to report any suspected child abuse to law enforcement, and failure to do so puts you at risk of arrest. When you’re a mandatory reporter at a college or university, you’re required to report any suspected sexual violence against a student to your school’s Title IX Coordinator, and failure to do so puts you at risk of losing your job.

Why Abuse Survivors Still Think Twice Before Telling their Stories: Retaliation At Goshen College

by Stephanie Krehbiel and Hilary Scarsella

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Documentation:
Introduction to May 5 event from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Rachel Stoltzfus
Update Statement from Erin Bergen (July 2018)
Goshen Signed Resolution Agreement with U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights
Facebook Live Stream video of statements by Anneliese Baer and Rachel Stoltzfus, recorded at Goshen College, May 5, 2018

“There are many survivors who would like to be present today, but are restricted by time, financial burden, and the ever-present weight of Goshen College’s past inaction and silence surrounding our abuse. Let us not forget the voices that are not present today, and the implications of who has the most access to this space. As we take in these stories, remember that this meeting is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening after 6 years of constant silencing, and that affects how the information is presented today.”
–Anneliese Baer, May 5, 2018, Goshen College

On May 5, two courageous women who were abused in the Goshen College women’s soccer program, Rachel Stoltzfus and Anneliese Baer, spoke on the Goshen College campus about their experiences. Their stories included testimony about sexual harassment, racial misconduct, homophobia, stalking, financial manipulation, emotional abuse, housing and food deprivation, and life-threatening physical conditions. The stories began with the 2011-2012 school year, spanned the tenure of two different coaching teams, and implicated multiple current and former members of the Goshen administration and Athletic Department. Rachel and Anneliese spoke in front of Goshen President Rebecca Stoltzfus, a select group of students, the president’s cabinet, and other invited members of the larger Goshen community.

At the behest of other victims of abuse in the Goshen athletic department who could not be present or were legitimately fearful of retaliation if they showed up at the May 5 meeting, Anneliese and Rachel made their statements accessible to fellow victims and their supporters through a public Facebook Live video. In the time since that meeting, a number of Goshen leaders have tried to discredit the survivors who spoke, focusing on their decision to do so publicly. These survivors agreed to a physical meeting with a restricted guest list, but contrary to some of the recent assertions made by administrators and Goshen board members, there was never any agreement about containing these victim impact statements behind closed doors. Accusing these women of wrongdoing for publicly streaming their own words has operated as a convenient pressure valve for an administration that is clearly facing the heat from multiple directions.

We are sympathetic to the pressures administrators and board members face when confronted with the failure of their institution to adequately respond to abuse, but managing such pressures is well within the job description for administrators, and well within the expected commitments for board members. These women are not asking Goshen leaders to do anything but their jobs, and even that request, they make at great personal risk to themselves. It’s the responsibility of Goshen’s board and administrators to negotiate the difficult dynamics of their positions without passing the burden of that difficulty on to survivors calling the college to account for abuse they experienced at Goshen as students.

One of the most harmful things a college president can do, after revelations of systemic abuse in an athletic department, is to attack the integrity of survivor whistleblowers in front of all the students and personnel in that same department. When administrators and boards try to take pressure off of themselves by criticizing victims, the only people who really benefit, ultimately, are abusers.

And yes, that has already happened at Goshen, since May 5.

Survivors’ fears of retaliation have not been unfounded. As Into Account has continued to work with survivors at Goshen, they have brought us extensive documentation and evidence of recent retaliation. Due to confidentiality and our concerns about further retaliation, we are not sharing all the details we have at this point. However, it is our confident opinion that Goshen administration and Board of Directors share responsibility for responding to abuse revelations and May 5 victim impact statements with tactics that have fomented further abuse against current students.

On a related note, Goshen College is currently in a mandatory agreement with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, due to multiple failures in Goshen’s Title IX protections against sexual harassment. Those failures were found by OCR investigators after our client, Erin Bergen, filed a federal complaint against Goshen for mishandling her own case of sexual assault.

Title IX forbids retaliation against students who report abuse. Title IX also demands that schools take preventive action to protect students from hostile environments. Since May 5, in our opinion, Goshen has already failed on both counts. Those failures have caused terrible harm in individual lives. Furthermore, these failures are undermining what we had dearly hoped was some concrete progress in Goshen’s approach to race and sex discrimination.

As victim advocates representing current and former students who have experienced both, we are in the difficult position of receiving multiple reassurances from Goshen officials that we feel unable to trust, due to duplicitous actions that have intimidated and retraumatized our clients.

Not only are administrative attacks on victims unethical, immoral, and frequently illegal, they are also ultimately self-defeating. The past fifteen years of revelations about sexual assault cover-ups and high-profile administrative resignations at colleges and universities across the country should have taught this to all of us by now. The repressive tactics that worked for previous generations of leaders in higher education do not work any more. Social media is a large part of the reason why.

As of today, that Facebook live video of victim impact statements delivered to Goshen on May 5 has received nearly 3500 views. For a school as small as Goshen, that is a lot of views. There will be more. And these will not be the last Goshen survivors to come forward on social media and say #metoo.

Goshen owes these women. We need to be clear about that: the debt is flowing in one direction. There are far more victims from these soccer teams than those who spoke on May 5, and Goshen can never begin to repay them what they are owed. We are not going to entertain talk of our clients owing yet more gratitude to Goshen leaders for their willingness to listen to stories of abuse that happened in the recent past at Goshen. These women have been more than courteous. They deserve far better than to be treated like naughty children by officials from a school that is still struggling to meet minimal compliance standards related to the kinds of abuse that they suffered.

Survivors use social media because social media is the best way to reach other survivors. With the international #metoo movement, this is more the case than ever before. Social media allows us to organize while at the same time protecting us–albeit imperfectly–from physical and psychological peril. It gives us tools to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics we encounter from institutions. Survivors’ power is amplified through the people that we reach with our stories.

And thus, when college officials decry survivors’ use of social media, it’s time to pay extra attention to the content of what has been posted. To that end, we’re sharing the Facebook live video here, as well as printed versions of Anneliese’s and Rachel’s comments from the video.

We’re going to keep sharing their words. Into Account makes no apology for our role in disseminating their stories. Goshen cannot afford to attack these women; the news they carry is too important. When student athletes make up half of the student body, and when the bulk of recruiting of students of color happens through the athletic department, nothing is more important than making sure that the leaders and coaches of that department are people whose first priority is the health and safety of students. Not administrators’ egos. Not institutional reputation. Not fundraising goals. Right now, holding the health and safety of students as the first priority means practicing nondefensive solidarity with those who are asking for accountability, apology, and change.

To quote the refrain of thousands of wise activists over many years of struggle: People are more important than institutions. We understand the loyalty that can lead people to want to believe the best of their alma maters, particularly when they had good experiences there themselves, or know people who work there and work hard. But a college that builds its economic survival on the backs of abused students is undeserving of such loyalty. If you want the colleges and universities that you love to survive in a way that is worthy of your support, hold them to these high standards. Anything less is a betrayal of your trust.

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Better Reporting for Bethel: Student Leaders Discuss Their Resolution to Promote Callisto

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017

For too many college victims, reporting an assault to campus authorities is a scary, obstacle-laden process. At small colleges, where it can seem like everyone knows everyone, reporting can be particularly fraught.

What if, for instance, your rapist is related to the Title IX Coordinator? (Yes, unfortunately, we’ve seen that.) What if someone on the investigative committee goes to your church? What if your abuser has threatened to retaliate if you tell anyone? What if your abuser is popular and has lots of friends? What if your college has a real “we’re all one big happy family” vibe going on and you’re worried you’ll be punished for raining on the parade with your rape story?

Most victims don’t report. At big schools and small schools alike, that’s still the reality.

There’s no reporting system that is a panacea for these problems. But the best online system we’ve seen so far, in terms of its sensitivity to the reporting issues faced by survivors, is Callisto, a platform designed by sexual violence survivors in the tech industry. Callisto does several important things that other systems do not. For instance, Callisto allows victims to make time-stamped reports of their assaults that they can wait to submit until they are ready—a feature that is particularly useful for victims fearing retaliation. They can also choose to submit their report only on the condition that another person names the same perpetrator. Reports can be anonymous. (Watch Callisto’s founder, Jessica Ladd, describe the system in this Ted Talk.)

Callisto has only been around since the 2015-2016 school year, but at the thirteen colleges where it has been adopted, the results are astounding. In the 2016-2017 school year, survivors who used the system were five times more likely to report their assaults than survivors who did not. Ninety-seven percent of Callisto’s users say they would recommend it to other survivors. Even during the pilot year of the project, when they worked with only two colleges, the sexual assault reports on those campuses quadrupled. (That’s a good thing, by the way. It doesn’t mean that the rate of assaults is increasing; it means that there’s a reporting system in place that victims are finding more approachable.)

On October 29, the Student Government Association of Bethel College (North Newton, Kansas) unanimously passed a resolution in support of Bethel adopting Callisto as its online reporting system for sexual violence. Into Account spoke with Kiley Varney, a senior biology major and the Bethel student body president, and Rebecca Schrag, a junior graphic design major, student government representative, and president of Bethel’s feminist collective Femcore, about the reasons for the resolution, and the current state of sexual violence reporting and education at Bethel.

If you’re part of the greater Bethel community–an alum, faculty or staff member, parent, and/or donor–Bethel students need your help right now. There’s one simple thing you can do to help student government bring Callisto to Bethel: Go to the Callisto website and fill out the form entitled “Bring Callisto to Your School.” You can fill this out as a student, alum, parent, staff/faculty/administrator, or “other.” Let Callisto know you’d like to see them at Bethel. And watch this space: we may have more actions related to Bethel and Callisto for you to take in the coming months.

If you’d like to advocate for Callisto at another school you’re connected to, you can also fill out the form for that school. Student activists interested in Callisto can download Callisto’s activist toolkit. Contact us here at Into Account if you need help getting started.

Into Account: Tell us about the reporting system that Bethel has right now. What options do students have for reporting? What are the issues with that system?

Varney: Bethel currently has a platform via our online campus infrastructure (ThresherConnect) that allows students to report student life-related concerns. When a student fills out this form, there is space for them to describe the event they are reporting as well as a space to describe their desired outcome of the situation. There is space for students to fill out their name and contact information if they wish to, but this section is optional.

I see a few problems with this system.

First, the form is called a “Student Life Concern Form”. This wording does not make it clear that the system can be used to report issues of sexual violence. Nowhere on the form does it explicitly say that it can be used to report sexual violence cases either. Even though this system is set up to handle reports of sexual violence, it is also used for a variety of other things such as roommate issues. The form even includes specific instructions for what to do if the concern is related to a class/professor. If a student were going to use this form to report a case of sexual violence but then saw these instructions for reports about a class, they might be deterred from reporting, for fear that this would not be the right place to do so.

Second, when a student does submit a concern via this system, it is unclear what happens to the information afterward. Based on the information given on this platform, a student would not know who their report got sent to and whether or not the information would be kept confidential. Not knowing who would see a report and what actions would be taken because of it might keep someone from reporting a case of sexual violence.

The third problem I see with this system is that a large number of students on our campus do not know that it exists. If students do know that it exists, they may not know that it exists to serve as a reporting system for issues of sexual violence among other issues on our campus. The system is not well-advertised a place to report sexual violence cases. Sexual violence is an issue that deserves its own reporting system that is separate from other student life concerns, and students should be better informed of what the system is for and how to use it.

Into Account: What are some of your biggest concerns about sexual violence on the Bethel campus?

Varney: My biggest concerns would be: 1) we don’t have an adequate reporting system, and 2) we do not do enough to educate students on issues of sexual violence and how to prevent them and report them. I am pleased with some of the work being done at Bethel to provide resources for survivors. We have a local organization called SafeHope with trained professionals that come to campus once a week and provide a space for people to talk about things that have happened to them or someone they know even if the occurrence was a long time ago. We also have a licensed counselor on campus that can provide regular counseling services to students. We are making progress in providing these services to survivors, but there is still more that can be done to improve education, awareness, and resources available to students.

Into Account: Tell us about your interest in getting the Callisto reporting system. How did the student government association get involved in promoting Callisto at Bethel? What led to your resolution? What are you hoping for?

Varney: This summer, I was informed about Project Callisto by Dwight Krehbiel (Professor of Psychology at Bethel, father of Stephanie Krehbiel, Into Account’s Co-Founder/Executive Director). Dwight also introduced me to two community members who are willing to put forth resources to help implement Callisto at Bethel. I learned about what the Callisto is and brought it to the entire student government to discuss.

At first, I was hesitant for SGA to support Callisto because of its high cost. It seemed like there would be better ways to use the money that the community members were willing to put forth to implement multiple educational/awareness tools and resources for students regarding sexual violence, instead of spending it all on a reporting system. After discussing these concerns at length with the Senate and seeing that many Senate members felt that Callisto would be worth the money and worth our support, I wrote a resolution that established official SGA support. The resolution, which states that SGA officially supports the college to pursue the implementation of Callisto, was passed by the Senate a few weeks ago.

With the passage of this resolution, we hope to continue to be in contact with everyone involved in influencing the College to implement Callisto. We have also reached out to the Title IX Coordinator and hope to meet with her and possibly other members of the committee after the new year to discuss Callisto as well as SGA’s other goal of implementing Bystander Training on campus. The resolution establishes SGA’s support (and by extension, the student body’s support) for the College to actively pursue Callisto, and we hope that that support will have a lot of influence on those making decisions about the implementation of Callisto. The resolution also lays the foundation for SGA members to continue to encourage the implementation of Callisto in whatever ways we may see necessary in the future.

Schrag: What I really love about Callisto is its emphasis to empower survivors of sexual violence. It would help resolve issues that our reporting system currently faces by giving victims options and support as well as a match system that safely connects victims of the same perpetrator together to validate each other’s experience and take action.

Into Account: Besides a better reporting system, what kinds of changes would you like to see in the way that Bethel approaches sexual violence?

Varney: I think that education about sexual violence and issues surrounding it can be improved. SGA is actively working on trying to bring Bystander Training to our campus. Bystander Training would be a great start to educating people about situations of sexual violence and how to intervene when they see dangerous or potentially dangerous interactions occurring. I would like to see Bystander Training implemented by next fall, and I hope that more education and awareness programs, as well as more availability to resources for survivors can be increased in the future too.

Schrag: I would like to see Bethel prioritizing these issues more. Last year, Bethel released a video spreading awareness of sexual violence and assault that specifically college students face. It was a step forward for Bethel to be aware that we have a problem but now it is time for us to create programs that combat this epidemic.

A Manifesto on Ass-Grabbing*

November 21, 2017November 21, 2017

by Stephanie Krehbiel

“It’s a no for me.”

*(-slapping, -patting, -squeezing—honestly, if you’re parsing the distinctions by order of offensiveness, you’re already in hot water)

The two most salient points I have to make about ass-grabbing are a) It is not trivial, and b) It is ubiquitous.

Ass-grabbing is just this thing that we’re supposed to live with. It’s fun, people say. It’s no big deal, people say. Take it as a compliment. I know this person who gets offended if people aren’t regularly grabbing their ass! Honestly, there are just so many rules these days, I can’t keep up with all these rules, everyone’s so sensitive now.

Is it really so difficult to not grab people’s asses? If you really value that sensation, could you maybe get yourself some sort of squeeze toy? They sell them in the pet store.

But that’s not as fun, is it? And the reason it’s not as fun, for the ass-grabbers among us, is that ass-grabbing is first and foremost a display of dominance. The aggressively sexual ass-grab in a bar and the grandfatherly ass-pat that George HW Bush is apparently so fond of—these are both displays of entitlement to another person’s body. It doesn’t matter if the intention was “affectionate.” If it weren’t meant, on some level, as a display of dominance, that expression of affection would not involve someone’s butt.

The person on the receiving end of that display may be accustomed to that kind of thing; they may be completely acculturated into thinking of their own body as something that exists for the pleasure of others. They might laugh it off, or not react, or try to be “game” about it. None of this means your ass-grab was harmless. It means your ass-grab was just part of a larger cultural context in which some people feel entitled to do whatever they like with other people’s bodies, regardless of how those other people feel about it.

Your ass-grabbing may be the least of the regular physical/emotional/sexual violations that your target is already experiencing on a regular basis. That doesn’t exonerate you; it just makes you one of a whole bunch of other entitled jerks.

Mostly, we put up with sexual harassment like ass-grabbing because we have no idea what kind of immediate hell might rain down on our heads if we stand up to it in the moment. Some men will go from “hey girl, love that ass,” to “I’m going to kill you, you f___ing b__ch” in less than a minute. If you’re getting off on inciting the fear of that response in another person, you need to re-examine your life.

“Hard nope.”

Some people deal with constant ass-grabbing, every day. They go to work and people grab their butts while they’re doing their jobs. It’s just one of the courses in the daily diet of sexual harassment. Ask nurses; ask women who do housekeeping and maintenance work; ask restaurant servers and kitchen staff. Ask women in any industry that is dependent on the labor of undocumented people. You won’t last long in a lot of jobs if you won’t put up with ass-grabbing. You are disposable to your employers in jobs like that, especially if you are being paid under the table and/or have no legal rights or no way of enforcing the rights that you do have. Ass-grabbers generally understand the overall shape of that situation.

Ass-grabbing is frequently a surprise. It’s fun for people who like to display dominance because it’s a stealth act that hits its target from behind. You catch them off guard. If you take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, ass-grabbing is for you.

If you take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, something is wrong with you and you need to be stopped. If you don’t take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, then you have absolutely zero reason to be non-consensually messing with another person’s butt.

(But, for heaven’s sake, just a little pat! That’s not “messing with another person’s butt”! You’re just so sensiti—NO. GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. NO PATS.)

If you like butts—and why shouldn’t you?—you can do consensual grabbing and whatever else with your partner/s of choice, or you can grab your own, if your arms are long enough. That is not an expression of dominance. That is fine. This is not about having something against butts. This is about having something against being an asshole.

Men and boys grab women’s and girls’ asses, a lot. But there is plenty of other ass-grabbing happening as well. I’ll take a few specific patterns that I’ve heard about consistently from friends and clients. This list is not comprehensive, obviously.

A lot of white women, for instance, have a bad habit of assuming that Black men want their asses grabbed by white women. This is stupid. Cut it out. Black men are people, and thus their asses should not be viewed as available for general grabbing. There is not some super-special, white woman/Black man thing that makes this OK. The script you re-enact, as a white woman grabbing a Black man’s ass, is “We owned you before, and we can own you again.” It doesn’t matter if that was the furthest thing from your mind. (Whatever was in your mind was also nonsense.) That script was written before you ever showed up.

Gay men also put up with a maddening amount of ass-grabbing from other gay men (and ostensibly straight ones too). Toxic masculinity is not just for straight people. Most of the young gay men I know are as embattled and wary about sexual harassment as women are. If you are a gay man who grabs other men’s asses, you are as much of a dickhead as straight people who do that. If you are a gay man who grabs women’s asses because you think it doesn’t “count” because you don’t have sex with women, sorry. It counts. You don’t have to want to have sex with us for us to perceive it as an act of dominance over our bodies.

Then there’s the ass-slapping in football. I would probably need another blog post to even talk about that. Like, where do I even begin with football?

: Seriously. Walk. Away.

And finally: don’t slap/grab/pat your kids’ butts. Don’t let other people touch your kids’ butts. It may seem like nothing, but it isn’t nothing. Allowing that to happen is one way that kids learn that their bodies are not theirs, that they have no right to refuse consent. Teach kids not to grab each other’s butts. They will probably try it, because kids are little humans and they imitate what grown-up humans do. Don’t shame them for it. Teach them.

Teach them so this is the last generation of thinkpieces explaining why everyone deserves a butt free of unwanted touches. Let’s stop ass-grabbing before it begins.

Education is Power: Your Three-Part Guide to Campus Sexual Violence and Title IX in a Time of Crisis

July 24, 2017September 27, 20173 Comments

by Stephanie Krehbiel

Series Introduction:

With all the drama to choose from in the news, a person could be forgiven for not following the latest Title IX developments in the U.S. Department of Education. A lot has been going on there, though, and unfortunately, none of it is very encouraging to those of us who are passionate about ending campus sexual violence.

But if education is power—and I know that it is—we have resources in abundance, and we plan to use them! One of our long-term organizational goals at Into Account is to help students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni be as well-informed as possible when they encourage/push/demand change related to the sexual violence in their schools. This post is the first of a three-part series on Title IX, sexual violence, and higher education. In part one, I’ll talk about why Title IX exists. In part two, I’ll walk you through the current threats to the movement against campus sexual violence, and how students and advocates are fighting them. Part three will discuss the particular challenges of Christian colleges, and how the conservative movement for “religious liberty” has made campuses less safe for students vulnerable to sexual violence (particularly LGBTQ students).

You don’t have to become an expert on landmark federal legislation to care about this stuff. But information about existing laws can give you the confidence to advocate from your deepest values. Here’s one of ours: regardless of who you are, your body belongs to you and you alone, and you deserve to go to school, and to learn, without having to live in fear that someone will violate it. If all the laws changed tomorrow, we’d still fight for that. Every bit of activism that Into Account does around Title IX enforcement stems from that unshakeable conviction.

Part One: When Freedom from Sexual Violence Became a Civil Right

Regular readers of our blog may remember Erin Bergen’s account of her own experience with the Title IX complaint process at Goshen College after she was sexually assaulted there as a student. In the fall of 2016, before the U.S. presidential election, Erin filed a complaint against Goshen with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. The OCR notified Erin in December 2016 that they would be investigating Goshen as a result of her complaint.

Before talking about what has happened with Erin’s case since December, it’s worth reviewing why Title IX is relevant to campus sexual violence, and why complaints like the one Erin made to the OCR are integral to enforcing it. Title IX became federal law in 1972, as an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. (The HEA is a landmark bill that increased federal funding for colleges and universities and financial aid for students.). Title IX’s purpose is to prevent discrimination based on sex in all federally-funded educational institutions. In language and intent, it reflects the precedent set by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” in voting, public accommodations, public education, and employment. (I’m glossing over a lot of detail and nuance in that 1964 legislation. So your civics assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to go read the whole law. It’s a good thing to do in these times.)

With this federal protection against sex-based discrimination in place, the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence at colleges and universities became a civil rights issue. For the first time, the federal government recognized what many women in higher education already knew: that the prevalence of rape, abuse, and sexual harassment at colleges and universities constituted a serious educational access barrier. (Sexual violence isn’t just cismen* abusing and assaulting ciswomen, but when Title IX first became law, no one in government was talking about other forms of sexual violence in relation to campus policy. More on that, and Title IX’s particular relevance to LGBTQ students, later in the series.)

Title IX regulations stood in defiance of a mess of narratives reinforced by religion, institutional practices, and patriarchal logic: That women lie about sexual assault. That some women deserve to be raped. That men’s sexuality is beyond their own control and women are responsible for keeping it in check. That the sexual dominance of men over women is the natural order of things. That the education of women is less important than the education of men.

And yet as monumental as this defiance was, and as far-reaching as the implications were, the passage of Title IX did not lead to a glorious, new, violence-free era for women in higher education. For many women students, victim-blaming narratives and misogynist stereotypes have been more powerful than the protection afforded by the law. When I was a college student in the nineties, I had no idea that Title IX was related to anything but women’s athletics. In that era, my ignorance of its full reach was more the norm than the exception.

Today, almost two decades since I graduated from college, people know a lot more about Title IX. This is thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s attention to civil rights issues generally, and campus sexual violence in particular. Under Barack Obama and his appointees, the Department of Education aggressively promoted a proactive approach to sexual violence in colleges and universities. This meant reviewing and changing policies, and addressing weaknesses with education and training, rather than secrecy and intimidation. Being proactive even meant doing what was almost certainly counterintuitive for many administrators: encouraging victims to report, with the near-certain knowledge that their school was no dazzling exception to the dismal statistics.

A lot of positive change came out of those eight years. Had things remained as they were before then, it’s unlikely that either Erin or Beth would have had the resources to come forward and ask for accountability from their schools. The number of student victims who filed complaints about their schools with the federal government skyrocketed during the Obama administration. Some people look at this fact with suspicion, but as an advocate, I see it as a sign that something was giving victims hope, that the benefits of coming forward were finally starting to outweigh the risks.

In spite of all of that, one of the enduring challenges of Title IX legislation is its dependence on victims reporting their grievances. Unfortunately, the evidence still suggests that the overwhelming majority of victims do not. For victims, pursuing a Title IX complaint means submitting to a process that requires a great deal of faith in the school’s ability to listen without judgment, to maintain confidentiality, and to protect them from retaliation. If a school’s policies and culture are such that survivors can’t be assured of those things, they are likely to stay quiet.

That very silence can be used as evidence that the school doesn’t have a sexual violence problem. But when 23.1 percent of college women and 5.4 percent of college men nationwide experience sexual assault, the reasonable assumption isn’t that zero reports means zero assaults– the reasonable assumption is that something is wrong with the reporting system. A college that reports zero sexual assaults in its Clery statistics may as well be waving a red flag of warning.

Erin’s complaint went through the OCR in a moment of transition, between a U.S. administration with unprecedented interest in fighting campus sexual violence, and an administration led by a president with a storied history of sexually abusive behavior towards women and a general disdain for federal regulations. Perhaps that’s why, over seven months after hearing that the OCR was investigating her case, Erin still hasn’t heard anything new. Goshen College hasn’t heard anything new, either. According to Ken Newbold, the Title IX Coordinator and Interim President at Goshen, nothing has changed in relation to the investigation since Erin’s story came out in April, at which point Goshen made the following statement: “In regards to the current Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigation, we have already responded to the requests and are fully cooperating with the investigators.”

In an email to me, Newbold added the following, however: “Regardless of the OCR’s current approach to enforcement of Title IX, we are committed to campus safety for all of our students and continuing to improve the development of proactive initiatives related to sexual violence and misconduct education, prevention and response. One example I would like to highlight, is that by early September at least 75 percent of our student body will have received bystander intervention training — led by students in our Prevention Intervention Network — to be equipped with skills to respond when they observe unhealthy situations.”

The reforms that Newbold lays out here are straight out of the Department of Education’s 2011 guidelines for Title IX enforcement, issued in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter that is now under considerable fire by Trump appointees. If Goshen is currently taking those guidelines more seriously than ever before, student activists like Erin deserve a large portion of the thanks. And while changing the campus culture through student-led initiatives is transformative and necessary, seeing a survivor-centered policy audit and subsequent overhaul of institutional policies and practices would be a tangible indication of a shift from business as usual.

Goshen has publicly committed to a policy audit in the past. They should follow through on that commitment–not because of any federal investigation, but because it’s the right thing to do for Goshen students and survivors.

We face a strong likelihood that the federal government is about to renege on its responsibility to survivors. If that happens, college students who are vulnerable to sexual violence are going to need their schools’ constituent communities more badly than ever, to apply some of the pressure that won’t be coming out of Washington anymore.

So this is no time to get complacent. Ask questions of your administrators. Push for concrete answers and follow-through. Support the students, faculty, and staff who you know are affected. Help your school live up to its best aspirations.

Part Two: Betsy DeVos and the debate over due process and standards of proof

*The prefix “cis” refers to people whose gender presentation and identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Committing Sexual Violence No Impediment to EMU Social Work Degree

April 22, 2017July 10, 20172 Comments

“Launch Your Future,” EMU’s website shouts in bold capital letters, as they prepare to hand a social work degree to a student who has – by EMU’s own finding – committed sexual violence.

Continuing Eastern Mennonite University (EMU)’s culture of staggering mishandling of sexual violence, EMU student Joel Wheeler is days away from graduating with a social work degree, despite the fact that EMU determined he committed “non-consensual vaginal intercourse,” “on at least one occasion.”

From the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, here is the legal definition of the word “rape”: ““The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

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