Faculty, Break the Silence: Support Women of Color, Support Survivors

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Now is the time to speak up. Sexual assault survivors face a higher level of incredulity than victims of other crimes face, even in interpersonal interactions; we as a community can challenge narratives that perpetuate that problem and encourage survivors to break their silence. While some of you reading this already engage with efforts to support survivors, many of you have yet to do so.

Silence speaks volumes. At a November 17th Title IX information session, Dean Sells stated that there haven’t been any reports of sexual assault at HLS this year. That doesn’t mean assaults aren’t happening, however. It means that students aren’t comfortable coming forward. According to the campus climate survey, 11 of the 1087 survey respondents from HLS reported nonconsensual attempted or completed penetration. Another 33 HLS students reported instances of reported nonconsensual sexual touching that involved physical force or incapacitation. All of these instances occurred within the 2014-2015 school year alone.

Another reason to speak up? Women of color are at the greatest risk for sexual violence; this is due to, as Critical Race Theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains, their location at the intersection of race and gender. Daniel Holtzclaw’s trial stands as a prototypical example of how racism and physical entitlement intersect: Holtzclaw, a police officer, specifically targeted Black women because he presumed that this class of sexual assault victims would not be believed. Harvard is not immune to these intersectional forces of oppression. According to the results of the recent Harvard campus survey, women of color are victims of nonconsensual sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation at the highest rates: 7% of American Indian & Alaska Native graduate-school women, 6.7% of Asian graduate-school women, and 5.7% of Black graduate-school women, compared with 5.1% of white graduate-school women.

Ignoring these realities and implying that support for sexual assault survivors conflicts with support for racial justice is problematic on many levels, including that it dangerously excludes women of color from dialogue on either issue. Black men certainly face bias in adjudicative systems, and there is a strong legacy of Black men falsely accused of—and severely punished for—assaulting white women. Yet trying to weaken campus sexual assault responses does not fix that problem. Instead, it both further marginalizes women of color—whose histories are also full violence—and increases their vulnerability.

According to the Department of Justice, women of color are also far less likely to report their assaults. This fact is particularly worrying considering that at Harvard, sexual assault victims of color face choosing among mostly-white mental health counselors for support and potentially being appraised by a mostly-white faculty in any disciplinary hearing. Only 5-28% (depending on the violation type) of survivors who completed the climate survey said they had reported their assault to an authority. When asked, the dominant reason the incident was not reported was “I did not think it was serious enough to report.” Messages perpetuating victim-blaming tropes, like a faculty-­signed press release that references a Black survivor’s inebriation, reinforce for sexual assault survivors the fear that powerful members of their institution might be biased against them. This, too, must impact their willingness to report assault.

But the existing climate here can change. You can help to counter that narrative and signal support. For example:

  1. Support the Reclaim Harvard Law Demands — Sexual assault survivors are disproportionately represented in marginalized genders, races, and socioeconomic classes. Please sign the faculty letter to show up for these intersecting populations and to build a more inclusive HLS.
  1. Consult the marginalized community you’re trying to include —  Their feelings are valid. As an educator, you can take concrete steps to ensure their voices are heard in your classroom. It’s not enough to say you’ve talked with individual students during office hours: they are not there to represent an interest group to which they may belong. You wouldn’t say you understand racism by speaking with one or two students of color. To learn more about how to create a supportive environment, reach out to organizations that are made up of and/or work with survivors, and have thus built understanding over time, like the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention & Response (OSAPR), the Harvard Law School Gender Violence Program, Sexual Assault/Sexual Harassment Advisers (SASH), the Harassment/Assault Legal Team (HALT), or the countless professional resources for understanding trauma and campus assault.

Thank you for reading this. We believe in you.

  • Harassment/Assault Legal Team*

*pending name change due to student organization approval