Campaign participants no longer want to fight rape culture as 'Jane Doe'
By Maia R. Silber
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH (AP) - Most of us, Lizzie Schnarr knows, don't want to talk about it.
She feels differently.
Over the winter break of her freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh, Schnarr attended a party at another school. She drank too much, and when an acquaintance pulled her into a bathroom and demanded sex, she was too impaired to say no.
Afterward, Schnarr tried to push the incident out of her mind. Not until she visited the doctor's office, where a nurse asked her if she had had sex - and if she wanted to have sex - did she define the experience as rape. Then, she made a plan.
"This semester has been all about empowering myself to define the situation, rather than letting it define me," she said.
Back at school, Schnarr joined the campus group Students Engaging in Conversations about Consent and Sexuality (SECCS). Then, in April, she heard about a new student initiative called Pitt Break Out Campaign, which had invited victims of assault and their allies to share their stories publicly or anonymously online. On April 16, she appeared in a photo on the campaign's Facebook page, wearing jeans and staring straight into the camera. Above her image, she wrote the story of her assault, and signed it with her name.
Schnarr received mostly positive reactions, but some of her friends and family members expressed surprise that she had chosen to go public. "I was like, 'Why'?," she remembers.
Or rather, "Why not?" That's the message of Pitt Break Out Campaign (also referred to as Pitt Breaking Out Campaign on Facebook), which follows a similar initiative at Duke University. Though it has long been standard protocol to grant anonymity to assault victims, the campaign's participants, like many young women, no longer want to fight rape culture as "Jane Doe."
Earlier this month, a former Stanford University student received a six-month jail sentence for sexually assaulting a woman on campus. The case drew attention when a statement written by the victim, in which she directly addressed the perpetrator, became public. In it, the victim slammed the media for hailing her assailant as a star swimmer and a scholarship student, while referring to her only as an "unconscious intoxicated woman."
Anonymity, the Stanford victim said, had protected her, but it had also prevented the public from seeing her as human. To those who argued that her assailant's life had been "ruined," she wanted to show that she had a life, too. Like her, the participants of Pitt Break Out Campaign want to tell their stories - stories that neither begin, nor end, with assault.
Schnarr plans to spend the summer at home in Philadelphia before returning to another busy semester of nursing training and advocacy. Her plan, she says, has "been going pretty well."
"Not Alone"
Jillian Bunis, from Sharon, Mass., applied to the University of Pittsburgh because she wanted the best. She hoped to become a nurse specializing in critical care, a field that deals with life-threatening conditions, and Pitt's School of Nursing is one of the top-ranked programs in the country.
Still, when Bunis, now a rising senior, enrolled, she realized that Pitt did not top every chart. Though she met students with intelligence and ambition, she found that many had trouble asking one simple question.
Bunis was discussing sex and relationships with her Kappa Delta sisters when one said something she'll never forget: "Nobody has ever asked me, 'Is that what you want?'"
Those words came to haunt Bunis when she went home the summer after her sophomore year, and was assaulted by an acquaintance. She had been drinking at a party, and woke up the next day to a blank spot in her memory and a text that read, "Oh yeah, we had sex if you didn't figure that out already... lol that happened."
Back at school in the fall, Bunis founded SECCS (the group that Schnarr later joined), hoping to teach her peers how to ask each other for consent.
Pitt requires all new students to attend training on alcohol use, sexual assault, and bystander intervention. Still, those discussions, Schnarr and Bunis said, are sometimes met by students with indifference, or even mockery; many pass the time texting, or joking around.
Students were forced to confront the issue this past September, though, when the Association of American Universities (AAU) released the results of its 27-school wide national "Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct." That survey found that 21% of female undergraduate respondents at Pitt had experienced attempted or completed non-consensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation since enrolling at school.
Pitt Title IX Coordinator Katie Pope believes that sharing these statistics at next year's orientation will help convey the urgency and importance of the issue. Pope, who has worked with the Break Out campaign since its launch in April, also plans to incorporate some victims' stories in orientation programming.
In the year following the survey, Pitt sponsored a number of additional assault-prevention events, even hosting Vice President Joe Biden on campus to speak about the Obama administration's initiative to fight campus assault, "It's on Us."
In spite of efforts to reduce stigma, Pope and the campaign organizers acknowledged, many victims - especially those still struggling through denial - may feel daunted by the prospect of reporting their assaults to an authority figure. According to numbers released in accordance with the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges to share information about crime on campus, 20 rapes were formally reported on Pitt's main campus in 2014.
Pope emphasized that students who report their assaults to the Title IX office are presented with a variety of options and resources, and may choose whether to pursue a university and/or criminal investigation. (In some cases involving safety threats, the law may require the Title IX office to conduct an internal investigation).
Though Bunis had initially worried that going public would compromise her role as a campus leader, she realized that that role would make her story all the more powerful.
"The outward perception was that that could never happen to me," she said. When they see that it can happen to anyone, students realize that they "don't have to suffer in silence."
"I'm going to do it"
Freshman year was a difficult transition for Jenny Garner: She had known everyone at her high school in Douglassville, Pa., and now she found herself struggling to make friends with the women in her dorm. By February, though, Garner had reconnected with an old friend, joined a dance team and developed an interest in social work.
One night, Garner attended a party. She went home with an acquaintance, intending to "hook up" but not go all the way. When she realized that he wanted sex, she said no, and he ignored her.
The next morning, Garner tried to brush the incident aside. She went to work at a restaurant and then met some friends at the library. But while her friends studied, Garner could only stare at the wall. She started to cry.
It took weeks for Garner to come to terms with her assault, and over a year to tell a friend. She never reported it: The possibility that an authority figure wouldn't believe her felt like too much to bear.
Two years after her assault, though, Garner decided to post her story through the Pitt Break Out Campaign on an impulse. "I remember looking at it for a while ... and then I was just like, whatever, I'm going to do it," she said. She typed out the whole story in one go.
Once they published their stories, Bunis, Schnarr and Garner met an outpouring of support. They received likes and comments on Facebook, e-mails from old friends, and got stopped on the street by acquaintances. Garner had been afraid of how her mom- who held some conservative views about sex- would react. When her mom read the post, she called her daughter; the two cried together on the phone.
Now Garner is thinking about pursuing a career in youth mental health counseling. It would be hard, she thinks, to talk to young people about difficult experiences, but rewarding, too.
"Who I Am"
When Sam Mostofa first came up with the idea for the Pitt Break Out Campaign in April, she had no idea whether anyone would want to participate - she knew so many women who had never told anyone besides a few friends about their assaults. Yet only a week after it launched, the campaign had received 20 submissions.
When organizers called for submissions again in June, after the Stanford case, they received another 35.
The submission that most surprised Mostofa was her own. She posted a picture of herself to the Facebook page, holding a sign that reads, "Shut up and just take it." That's what her assailant told her.
"So many women find they are not just treated as victims by their rapist, but also by people who make comments to them in passing, their friends and family," Mostofa said.
She found that asking women to share their experiences through art - the Facebook page invites women to submit poems, songs and quotes - helped women tell their stories. In the fall, when school starts, the campaign plans to set up a gallery of words and portraits, and to invite women to speak about their experiences on stage.
For now, the organizers believe, their campaign might change the way Pitt students talk about sexual assault: When you see Jane Does in class and the dining hall, it becomes harder to brush the issue of assault aside.
"The people you live with, and eat with, and sleep with, are affected by this," organizer Jayne Lester said.
The women who participated in the campaign feel, too, that they have been able to change the narratives about their own experiences.
"This is something that happened to me, but it isn't who I am," said Bunis. "How I dealt with it, and how I grew from it, is who I am."
Published: Mon, Jul 11, 2016
