Author: Rachel Liesching
Engaging in honest conversations about sexual violence and accountability is an unavoidably brutal process. It requires a community to acknowledge that sexual assault is an act of physical oppression carried out by its members against one another, and furthermore it asks that we invest a tremendous amount of energy in re-thinking our norms regarding sex, privilege and respect. Instead of recognizing the recent student actions against sexual violence as the efforts of conscious and discerning adults, President Veitch’s March 5 statement to the student body read like a disappointed father reprimanding his children for their disobedience. Due to federal privacy laws, the college may be limited in its ability to alert students to the details of ongoing sexual assault investigations. However, when it is a question of recognizing and respecting the experiences of survivors of sexual violence, there are no legal technicalities or procedural norms that reasonably justify his claim that the recent student efforts “reflect[s] poorly on their commitment to this conversation and to the broader education that must take place if we are to change a culture we all find repugnant.” President Veitch’s message to the student body served as an active discouragement against speaking openly about problematic aspects of Occidental’s culture.
No place remains untouched by sexual violence or gendered discrimination. As bleak an admission as it may seem, students cannot expect the Occidental administration to undo years of socialization in the space of a first-year orientation or an interpersonal dialogue workshop. However, students can demand that the administration do its best to cultivate empathy and awareness of sexual violence’s very existence and make the physical well-being of all community members a priority by sending a clear message that interpersonal violence is not tolerated. The college purports to recognize the problem of sexual assault and has formed a Sexual Assault Task Force and met with the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition (OSAC) to address their concerns, and yet the administration’s poorly managed response to recent events indicates an inability or unwillingness to understand sexual assault as the resultant product of unhealthy and insidiously common social attitudes.
In the past week, OSAC and its allies have produced one of the most well-coordinated action campaigns that the Occidental community has seen in recent years. The professors and several hundred students who openly articulated their frustrations with Occidental’s sexual assault reporting process were then presented with a message that infantilized their cause and re-cast their impressive organizing efforts as mere pettiness: “…there is a point where confrontation becomes an end in itself—satisfying, no doubt, but counterproductive with regard to our shared aims. When it crosses that threshold and descends into name-calling, vilification and misrepresentation, it undermines the trust and good will of everyone involved.”
Whether studying the Arab Spring in a DWA classroom or honoring civil rights leaders alongside administrators during Black History Month, many students have learned that agitation is a legitimate and necessary part of struggles for change, especially when it comes to articulating one’s aims. Telephone lines ringing off the hooks with calls from concerned alumni and students may disrupt business as usual, but they are meant to. Widespread participation in the peaceful demonstration held March 1, as well as DearOxy, a moderated Tumblr blog that does not disclose names and adheres to privacy laws, signals that students have successfully utilized social media and good old-fashioned people power as educational tools; not to mention, they have created a space where survivors, who might not otherwise be given the chance, can anonymously share their stories with one another. Clearly, it is not the College but rather the students that have created this conversation. Rendering their lived experiences invisible for the sake of maintaining the college’s exceptional image does little to demonstrate a commitment to its continuance. As a group of well-meaning and educated individuals with varied life experiences—being parents, partners, members of loving families and more—tasked with providing “a gifted and diverse group of students with a total educational experience of the highest quality,” the administration can do and must do better on behalf of students and survivors alike.
Occidental has the opportunity to join a handful of institutions that are creating best practices with respect and sensitivity duly given to those that they affect most. Most of the requisite elements for the formation of effective outreach and judicial procedures are already in place: a hope-filled and courageous student body, professors that can lend their expertise to on-campus efforts, organizations like Project S.A.F.E. and OSAC dedicated to educating their peers and the psychological and medical care that Emmons Health Center offers. With the help of participatory planning, community forums and other measures to improve transparency and accountability, the college can definitively state that they support survivors of sexual violence and other forms of discrimination, all the while complying with federal privacy laws. However, officially sanctioned responses from the college suggest that the pursuit of substantive action is not a matter of means, but will. At present, it seems as though the college’s internal calculus has determined that avoiding potential retaliatory lawsuits is a far greater priority than engaging the voices of its survivors and their allies in substantive conversation. To put it bluntly, this decision also has its own opportunity cost. A glimpse at DearOxy’s submissions reveal the potential impact upon alumni and parent donations; that the issue has received less than favorable media coverage has obviously not escaped the attention of President Veitch.
Our progressive education has continually asked us to resist our own biases and to engage in purposeful dialogues, even and especially in difficult moments. Under no circumstances should our administration expect us to uphold a culture of silence and shame. Reading President Veitch’s words summoned the memory of my own rape six years ago, a memory that has finally ceased to feel like a rope tied between my ankles, restricting my interactions with my surroundings in a manner I and many other survivors cannot easily ignore. Like much of what I was told in the years that followed, his statement implies that we do not possess the rights to own our most painful thoughts or experiences in their entirety, that remaining quiet is a necessary strategy for legitimacy, that rage cannot be a constructive force, despite history’s objections.
It is precisely for this reason that the conversation we have found ourselves thrown into is about a great many more people than just survivors of sexual violence. Every student who has lived through the effects of systematic bias and oppression must find an audience with the administration responsible for their well-being; they too must be told that sharing their truth is a necessary part of our path to knowledge and informed action. In the words of Audre Lorde, “as we come to know, accept and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas—the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.” The administration, too, must accept that as students, allies and survivors, we own our anger and rightfully deserve to determine how to best create community and accountability from the raw materials of violence and discrimination.
Rachel Liesching is a senior DWA major. She can be reached at liesching@oxy.edu.
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