On my first day of class 1L year, a professor said to me, “you came to law school as a person with common sense; don’t let 3 years of law school make you lose that.” Two years in, after watching and listening to the uproar surrounding the sexual assault policy, I have a slightly different spin on this.
We are people first, and lawyers second. No amount of good lawyering can make up for a lack of compassion. No amount of technical jargon or far-fetched hypotheticals can be substituted for human decency. My message to the professors who signed the letter criticizing Harvard’s new sexual assault policy and to Patrick Witt who published an op-ed is not a legal one, but a personal one. It is a message that began while I was sitting on the floor crying with survivors, waiting at police stations holding hands, and telling stories to victims until they feel asleep – one that I formed after my own experiences with sexual violence. When I read the letter, my first thought, the one I could not get out of my head was this:
Do they know how much this hurts?
Survive rape. Survive the worst night of your life. Know that your elite college – your community – isn’t going to care. Move on. Live your life. Attend a place like Harvard Law – a place where you get a chance to be taught by the best professors in the country to argue. To advocate. To fight for things that matter. Watch Harvard Law break the already weak federal law that protects people like you. Watch them try to change for the better. Then watch the women you look up to – the ones who are teaching you to have a voice in the law, to speak persuasively about things that matter – watch them say again that what happened to you doesn’t matter. That speaking on behalf of the hypothetical falsely accused is more important than speaking for victims. For people like you. Learn again that you don’t matter. Survive that.
Do they know how much that hurts?
I believe strongly in due process, and I think it’s more likely that I’ll end up using my law degree to defend a rapist than to prosecute one. I believe strongly that everyone deserves equal access to justice. I believe that when we write law and when we write policy, we have to consider hypotheticals. And I believe in some of the changes the professors have made like making the appeal process independent, clarifying the right already implied to a lawyer, etc.
But when those twenty-eight professors wrote to the Globe, they weren’t writing law. They were speaking as the faculty of Harvard Law to the public knowing full well that most people reading the letter would react with their gut rather than their minds. For most people reading that letter, this would become a black and white issue. And they chose the accused.
Let’s have informed discussions, but let’s have them in the appropriate forums; let’s not forget nuance or overstate what problems exist. Let’s remember that sexual assault is no more falsely reported than any other crime. It is, in fact, the crime that is least reported. Let’s keep in mind that there are survivors in our classes, in our homes, and in our hearts, who are still too scared to speak out.
When twenty-eight Harvard Professors choose to speak to the media, they could have spoken about student loans, the children crossing the border, or the police massacring black youth. They could have mentioned the due process rights of political detainees, refugees who are indiscriminately detained, or children who don’t get access to the kind of education they provide. They spoke instead about those accused of sexual assault on college campuses.
When people in positions of power speak, they shouldn’t forget that survivors are are silenced every day. They should remember that though it was an accused perpetrator who first identified himself to the Boston Globe, this was not because survivors aren’t here. It is because saying you’ve been raped still carries shame and blame. When we become lawyers, we can’t forget that we are people. The accused need us, but so do the faceless, nameless thousands of victims walking our campus.
This is a very troubling letter premised on a notion that is simply not correct, to put it charitably. The writer seems to think that those who raise concerns about the rights of persons accused of heinous sex offenses somehow don’t care about the victims of sexual assault. That is offensive in the extreme.
It is not an “either/or” proposition. People of good will who are concerned about a campus culture that makes it too easy to wrongly expel their sons can be — and usually are — also concerned about a campus culture that makes it too easy for their daughters to be sexually assaulted. We don’t address the latter by ignoring the former.
We need to have a mature dialogue about a very difficult subject, and folks who refuse to discuss the rights of the accused ought to be exiled from the adult table when that conversation occurs.
You seem to neatly assign individuals into the absolute classes of those with power (e.g., former Yale QB Patrick Witt and 28 Harvard Law professors) and those without it (e.g., anyone who has experienced sexual assault). While doing so, you attempt to silence those who (in your view) hold power for silencing the voice of those you deem powerless. Given your remarkable authority to determine the immutable nature of people, I am curious as to where I belong. I am a cisgender male alumnus of Harvard and Yale. I have recently experienced a physical assault by a (trans)man attempting to coerce me into oral and anal sex in his hotel room. Though I felt horribly for a few weeks after the incident, it was not “the worst night of my life” by a long shot. I have felt much worse due to sexual frustration some nights after striking out with women at clubs and the aftermath of subsequent belligerent outbursts.
It seems that when appealing to the public sentiment, the loudest lobby or special interest group prevails over balanced reporting promoting the general welfare, even to the point where half of a national crisis can be completely ignored. I am writing to offer another perspective, one that has been trivialized and dismissed throughout my life. Despite a lifetime of successes including multiple Ivy League degrees and involvement in the highest levels of athletic competition, sexual frustration has turned my life into an abysmal wreck. The incompatibility of my sex drive with the constraints of availability and societal norms has made the world a barren, hostile and inhospitable place through which I continue my sisyphean chase of the unattainable. I have undergone extreme weight fluctuations, experienced severe insomnia and difficulty with everyday tasks such as locomotion, been brought to the verge of tears for many consecutive days by simple acts such as eating in a dining hall surrounded by others– symptoms reminiscent of PTSD for those inclined to sensationalize their issues by giving them a name– mainly BECAUSE of my inability to find SEX. No, not because of some convoluted rationalization based on family history, alcohol use, Freudian psychoanalysis, etc. My chronic, withdrawal-like state of perpetual anguish is a direct consequence of the unforgiving biological punishment I face for failing to capitalize on the innumerable sexual opportunities that haunt me everywhere I turn. And there is nowhere to turn for help, as we are not mentally equipped as a society to accommodate any but the starkest black/white, male/female or predator/prey scenarios into our schema of what a victim is allowed to look like.
I challenge the HLR to foster meaningful dialogue that prominently features several sides of multi-faceted arguments rather than posting an overwhelming majority of articles pro-[HLR editors’ opinion] and relegating the other side of the argument to the comments section.
cool story, brah
Hmm is anyone else encountering problems with the images on this blog loading?
I’m trying to determine if its a problem on my
end or if it’s the blog. Any responses would bee greatly appreciated.
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