The Poetry Society was Maureen’s home on campus. Early in her freshman year she’d struggled to find her place, but in November she attended her first meeting and knew she had finally met her people. The group met weekly, and once a month they went out for drinks at a neighborhood bar after the meeting. It was typically a relaxed affair. Halfway into her sophomore year Maureen left the bar with a senior from the society. They’d been flirting with each other for a while. Neither was drunk. She was excited to go back to his room and make out. She wanted a little human contact, not to have sex. He raped her. Maureen continued to attend their weekly meetings, including the social hour at the bar where she’d connected with the man who raped her. She saw him at these events. She never told anyone what had happened.
Davis was out one night for some heavy drinking with the fencing team. A woman he’d repeatedly told he wasn’t interested kept buying him shots and eventually took him home to have sex. When he told his friends the next morning they laughed, saying that it had been obvious that she was trying to get him drunk so he’d go home with her. Several shared that they’d had the same experience with her; it was almost a rite of passage, and served as the basis for some kind of solidarity. Davis felt a little “weird” about it, but joined in their laughter.
Chase was raped by a fellow member of a tight-knit queer community. Chase tried to “work within a social justice framework,” gathering together peers to confront the person who raped them. Things went awry, and a community that had been a home on campus for so many quickly turned into one where people felt they had to pick sides.
Cindy, by her own report, had been drinking “way too much,” when she accompanied a man she knew casually back to his apartment, where he raped her. She reported her experience to police, as she felt she was supposed to. She later characterized this as “one of the worst decisions” of her life, referring not to what led up to the assault but instead to involving the police.
Adam never talked to his boyfriend about how pushy and forceful he was about sex, even after his boyfriend came home one evening after a long night of drinking and “basically raped” him. He was otherwise happy in the relationship and didn’t want to get his boyfriend into trouble.
Stephanie was depressed and felt alone. Her relationship seemed to be the only thing holding her life together. She had no sexual drive, and so the frequency of their sexual relations had dwindled. Her partner threatened to break up with her, saying to her, “Why are we in a relationship if we’re never going to have sex?” Stephanie lay there, enduring sex she didn’t want, to keep the relationship alive. Her depression worsened as the relationship crumbled.
The story of Karen’s rape in the park by her ex-boyfriend appears in Chapter 1. She told us the story in part because she knew there was something wrong about what had happened. She didn’t want sex. She even exclaimed “no” several times. But she also found it physically pleasurable. She used that pleasure, and the fact that she still cared about her ex, to minimize what had happened. She laughed when she described the experience to us. In our estimation, she seemed to be dealing with what happened and did not seem to be hugely affected by it.
After assaulting her friend, Diana, who we introduced in Chapters 4 and 6, stopped having sex altogether. Her previously very active sex life was gone; now she identifies as asexual.
We heard stories about other students who, after being assaulted, were so traumatized that they ended up dropping out of school. The ambition they’d organized so much of their life around—going to college—was no longer bearable. So our narrative may not fully capture the experiences of those whose trauma was the most severe.1
In the first chapter we outlined just how varied the experiences of assault are. This chapter bookends those stories of assault by emphasizing just how varied the aftermath is.2 What we consider as the aftermath of assault includes the decisions whether or not to label an event as an assault, to tell someone, and to make a formal report; and the community-level experiences of carrying each other’s burdens and navigating a sexual landscape that is filled with survivors of assault. Across dozens of stories of trauma, resilience, and recovery, there were some striking social regularities.
How could Maureen possibly go back to the Poetry Society, knowing she would likely continue to encounter the man who raped her? Why did students remain in relationships defined, in no small part, by intimate partner (sexual) violence? How could people have sex with a hookup who’d previously assaulted them? If assaults are so traumatic, why does it take some people so long to talk to others about them, and why do some never talk about them at all? For those of us who haven’t experienced assault—and even some of us who have—this doesn’t seem to make any sense. The gap between the imagined aftermath of sexual assault and the actual experience leads some to doubt those who tell their stories. The concept of a “social risk”—which was introduced in the third chapter to explain the cultural rationales and social goals that shape drunk sex—helps us understand these actions. It foregrounds what is at stake in labeling an experience “assault,” telling one’s friends, and reporting the experience to school or public authorities.3
Part of managing the aftermath of an assault is an individual choice or deliberation. But social risks can also be relational or institutional. By this we mean how peers and organizations influence how the person who was assaulted thinks and feels. Think of Rebecca, from the previous chapter, who was raped by two friends who had offered to walk her home when she was very drunk. Her other friend intervened while she was waiting in the hospital to get a sexual assault forensic exam. He insisted that her interpretation of what happened was “all wrong.” Understanding the aftermath of an assault means not just understanding “what happened”; it requires understanding how experiences are made meaningful. Friends work together to process and label experiences that are difficult to understand. An individual’s feelings for the person who assaulted them, as well as their understanding of themselves as someone who may have sought out a sexual encounter with that person, also shape the aftermath.4 The conceptual resources they have—what they have been taught about sex and sexual assault—matter, as does what they have learned about what happens when someone makes a formal report to the school or the police.5 Those who don’t believe that the adjudication process will produce a just outcome are unlikely to pursue it. People who have been assaulted weigh the costs and benefits of reporting, and are particularly cognizant of the time and effort reporting their experiences will entail. They ask if it is worth the effort, given what they see as the likely outcome: that they will not get the recognition or resolution they seek. In the aftermath of an assault, people experience feeling unheard as a kind of revictimization. Avoiding that is one reason that many decide not to proceed with reporting.
In recounting her story of rape, and explaining why she refused to think about what happened that way, Felicity told us, “I didn’t want to be ‘that girl.’” “That girl,” for her, is the girl who was raped. Because then maybe other people wouldn’t want to date her, or have sex with her, or they’d just avoid her. “That girl” is the girl who was out of control at a party and because of it got into a bad situation. “That girl” is the girl who wasn’t sexually in control of her life. “That girl” is the girl who “ruined” her friend’s life. “That girl” is the girl who wasn’t the assured, capable-of-anything, roll-with-the-punches modern woman all women should be, leaning in to her twenty-first-century sexual freedom and deftly managing all the risks that entails. “That girl” doesn’t have a name, and is only known because she was raped, or because she said she was.6
After being assaulted, not thinking about the experience as assault can feel protective. It allows students to help maintain their current understanding of themselves and their identity. It gives them more options—imagined or real—for the future. They can even think about themselves in moral terms. They turned the other cheek. They are capable of forgiveness and compassion. They are not defined by that scary, disempowering word: “victim.” Being a “survivor” can be an empowering response for those who choose it, a way to draw on one’s suffering to reduce stigma and to push for social change. But we found that many students did not want to be so publicly defined. And when it was their friend or partner who raped them, their own identity wasn’t the only thing at stake. Naming an encounter an “assault,” or worse, a “rape,” has consequences for the other person, and potentially also for the shared friend group or student activity. Is it really fair to label that friend a “rapist,” especially if you believe the label will “ruin their life”? The landscape that students who have been assaulted face is filled with social risks—for their friendships, for the organizations they call “home,” for their future, and even for the person who assaulted them.
In one of our very first interviews we talked to a freshman, Kate, who had been raped in the opening weeks of school. When we asked her about it, she rejected the label of assault. Yes, the sex had been “nonconsensual” (in her own words). No, she didn’t want it. Yes, she had said to her partner she did not want to have sex. But she was emphatic: it was not “assault.” She could see that we were having a hard time processing this. And so she explained, “‘Unwanted sex’ is, like, the scariest thing.” Kate was a commanding young woman. She seemed fully possessed of herself. Some of this, no doubt, was a performance, but a convincing one. She wanted to view herself as ever-capable of realizing her desires. She was unwilling to admit to herself or to anyone else that she was subject to the power and the will of another. Kate rejected the label assault. “I didn’t want to give him the power to be able to say that he did that to me. I just want to feel like it didn’t affect me.”
Over time, grounded in our broader commitment to understanding the socially shaped reasons that students act in ways that might seem initially puzzling, we came to understand that Kate did not lack awareness about what constitutes sexual assault. Her response was, instead, a partial consequence of the success in raising awareness about campus sexual assault as a public problem. Consciousness-raising by activists and scholars has done enormous good, transforming the private experience of some students into a public problem about which there is widespread concern.7 But to lift the profile of an issue that was ignored for so long, activists have had to raise their voices louder and louder. One strategy has been to frame assault as “the worst thing ever.” For some students who are assaulted, it is—leading to depression, isolation, and even suicide. But others do not experience it that way. And still others may have those experiences, but don’t want to, and so they will themselves to think about what happened as anything but assault.
On and off campus, people who are assaulted are questioned, vilified, or ostracized.8 Some don’t see themselves captured by the typical assumptions of what a victim looks like, because they’re men, or because they weren’t drunk, or because the person who assaulted them is their partner, not a predator. Some blame themselves for being in a situation because they wanted sex, feeling that such wanting necessarily comes with risks and harms. Being a “survivor” can transform the experience of being a victim of assault into a more positive social identity, but one that is in tension with other prospective identities, thereby making some sexual and life projects feel more or less possible.
Elsie went to a bar, got very drunk, and went back to the room of a friend she had previously hooked up with. When she woke up, her pants were on backwards. What could have happened? Who took her pants off and put them back on? Something felt so off about it. Elsie wondered if her friend had a part in this. But why? What was he covering up? She never spoke to him about it, or to anyone else. Talking to us was the first time she’d told her story. She had been too drunk to remember what happened. She didn’t know if she consented, or even if they had had sex. As she tried to make sense of it, voicing her experience, her thoughts kept swirling. “It, like, doesn’t—I don’t think that necessarily means that we had sex but I also don’t think. . . . But I also do think that it sucks. I really don’t remember. It sucks. . . .” Elsie paused, looking away. And then she came out and said it. “Not, like—only upsetting in that I should do better, you know? I’m upset with myself.”
Elsie was typical in thinking that what happened had been partly her fault. Students shared guilt and shame about putting themselves “in that situation”—whether that meant being at a particular kind of party, having too much to drink, being too flirtatious, or not recognizing the “reasonable” or “expected” consequences of their actions. Again and again, in the aftermath students who are assaulted question themselves.9
Camden, a Black man from the Midwest, told us about a party he had gone to freshman year. It was fun. He was drunk. And for a while he thought this is what college was all about. Then the woman he was dancing with, a senior, grabbed his crotch. He was shocked and not really sure what to do. He moved away a bit, but then two other women did the same thing, in rapid sequence. He wondered, were they her friends? He didn’t stick around to find out. After having his genitals repeatedly grabbed by women, he quickly left the party, overcome by embarrassment. Even two years later his eyes seemed to well up a bit thinking about it. The events met the definition of sexual assault—unwanted and nonconsensual sexual touching—but he did not define them that way. “I would have said no to them if they’d have asked,” he recounted. But he also felt like he should have known better. “This is how people interact; this is how people get down” in college.10 We read a racial element into Camden’s story—one he did not raise himself. The bodies of Black students seemed to be touched with alarming frequency, viewed as objects to be played with and commented on.11 Like Elsie, Camden had not told anyone about what had happened before he talked to us about it. But this kind of silence was not common.
Analysis of the SHIFT survey found that 81% of students who experienced “sexual contact without their consent or agreement,” regardless of whether or not they thought of it as assault, talked to their friends about what happened.12 Jemma went to talk to her friend Chantal soon after she had an “experience” with their mutual friend Derrick. She kept wondering if she was “irrationally upset” about what had happened. Chantal, she hoped, would give her some perspective. Jemma had been drinking—that much she remembers. She doesn’t think Derrick was anywhere near as drunk as she was. She doesn’t remember exactly how they got back to her room, though she’s pretty sure she invited him. She went in and out of consciousness as they had sex. She remembers bits of it. Her next definitive memory was waking up, alone and naked in her bed. A couple of days later she texted Derrick to see if he wanted to go down to Times Square and get same-day tickets for a Broadway show; it was something they’d been talking about doing for a while. She also asked him what had happened that night, telling him she didn’t really remember. “He was kind of like, ‘Oh, we kind of like hooked up and had sex,’ and I was like, ‘All right . . . ’ I was just kind of upset, I guess, or kinda like, I was like, ‘Well, it’s kind of a little slimy, I mean, a little bit.’”
Chantal assured Jemma that she had reason to be upset, that she wasn’t being irrational. This provided some comfort. Jemma was pretty sure she’d invited Derrick to her room, and had been flirty. But she also was unnerved by the fact that she had been so drunk, and that it never occurred to him to check in with her after she texted him she didn’t remember what happened. He never asked, “Are you okay? Should we talk about this?” In the end, Jemma was glad Chantal affirmed her experiences. She ended up going to a Broadway show with Derrick, but things weren’t ever the same again. Her entire life felt unsettled. She had trouble concentrating in class and maintaining friendships. She wondered what she’d done wrong. She questioned her capacity to evaluate people, and whether her friends truly respected her. How could Derrick be so cavalier about this? He knew they’d had sex when she was black-out drunk. Thinking back on it, it was so much more than the sex that bothered her. Everything was up in the air. “I felt pretty shitty about life. . . .”
Concerns about social failure and personal shame prevent most people from doing anything more than telling a close friend about what happened. Jemma experienced both of these—doubting her capacity to judge people’s true character, and fearing that a person she had thought of as her friend fundamentally did not respect her. Another woman with whom we spoke, who had been assaulted several times, was fearful that making a formal report would put her reputation as a “with it” woman at risk. Reporting, she told us, “involves way too many people. It means a ton of people that I could see on a regular basis would know.” She didn’t want the potential consequences for the person who raped her on her conscience, much less to have to deal with an investigation, where she’d have to counter his narrative, and where her friends, who had been with them before the assault happened, would be called in to testify. They’d have to pick sides. She was mad about what happened, but subscribed to the commonly held belief that if she said something, she’d “ruin his life.” She didn’t think it was worth it—particularly because she anticipated that their mutual friends would hold her partially responsible; she was a big drinker, after all, and she held herself partially accountable because of it.
Reports of assault require investigations. Investigations require witnesses. Friends are typically called in, as they are often present before the assault. Yet for people who have experienced assault, this is exactly what they do not want: for other people to know. Recall Kara from Chapter 1, who was assaulted her freshman year by a relative stranger as she slept in her bed. Her explanation about why she did not want to make a formal report was focused entirely on her relationship with her roommate. There had been so much tension. Things seemed as if they were starting to work out. She was finally feeling more comfortable coming back to her own room. But it was a fragile truce. If she said something, she figured, her roommate “would just hate me even more and be even more horrible to me.” In that moment, avoiding conflict with her roommate was more important than setting in motion a process to discipline the stranger who had taken advantage of her while she was drunk, pushing her head down to give him a blow job.
An analysis of SHIFT survey data found that 75% of victims knew their assailant. But they didn’t just know them socially—in the questions about the most significant incident of assault they had experienced, over 30% of students chose to describe something akin to intimate partner violence, raising challenges to labeling and reporting that go beyond preserving a friendship group.13 Those intimate-partner sexual assaults, as Louisa Gilbert’s analysis of SHIFT survey data showed, are more likely to be carried out by force, and less likely to take place under conditions of intoxication.14 The person assaulted is silenced from within by the acute shame that those in an abusive relationship often feel, but also by external pressure, of an experience that does not conform to predominant narratives about campus sexual assault. Refusing to think about what happened as an assault—even when the student has chosen to describe events in an interview about assault—helps preserve the identity of the person with whom the student has, or has had, a relationship. Recall Karen (Chapter 1), pushed back against a rock and raped in the park by her ex, who then dragged her to the ground as she said “no.” She justified his actions by reasoning that he probably thought of her “no” as about the place they were having sex (maybe the rock was uncomfortable?), rather than the sex itself. He was, to her, still a good guy. Some cognitive and emotional work was required to continue to think of him in this way: trying not to think about what happened at all, and when she did recall it, avoiding the label of “rape” for the “sex” to which she had explicitly and repeatedly objected. We see something similar in Adam, a gay man who was extremely critical of what he viewed as a culture of casual sex among gay men. He was so happy to have found a boyfriend. He did not have to be on the market anymore, to deal with men who said they wanted a relationship just to get him into bed, and then ghost him. Sure, his boyfriend was super forceful when he wanted sex. He even came back to Adam’s room one night and, in Adam’s words, “basically raped” him. Adam was completely sober at the time. He tried to stop it. But he never reported what happened, or even spoke to his boyfriend about it. He didn’t want to put his relationship at risk or get his boyfriend in trouble. He told some friends, in vague terms, about what was going on, but he didn’t want them to hate his boyfriend.
Both Adam’s and Karen’s stories highlight another consequence of thinking of assault as something committed by bad people, rather than by people who do bad things. Neither Adam nor Karen could imagine imposing the perpetrator identity on someone they were so close to, maybe even in love with. What would it say, after all, to be the kind of person who fell in love with, or enjoyed a relationship with, a rapist? It could pollute and even destroy fond memories and meaningful shared experiences. It could mean giving up a relationship that was one of the most important parts of your life, and even a core part of your identity. It could mean thinking of yourself as someone with poor judgment.
Sometimes people were emphatic in asserting that they did not experience what happened as traumatic. This was particularly true of men. Tim and Boutrous, introduced in Chapter 1, said as much, but there were also women who said their experience had not harmed them.
Beatrice was playing beer pong with some friends. After a couple of rounds, Alexei invited her back to his place to drink some more and smoke a joint. She ended up vomiting all over his room. She was mortified, but so out of it that she couldn’t even help as Alexei did his best to clean up. Beatrice recalled passing out on his bed. Later—she’s not exactly sure when—she was awakened by Alexei’s kisses, and his attempts to have sex with her. Still totally out of it, she nonetheless clearly recalls saying “no.” But as Alexei persisted in his sexual advances she decided to “get it over with” and help him orgasm. She fell asleep again, and when she woke up early the next morning, she rushed home, filled with embarrassment and confusion. Beatrice wondered: why would he want to have sex with her after she vomited everywhere? Wasn’t that just gross? Who would want to kiss after that? She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. Alexei tried to follow up with her, asking to hang out again, but Beatrice avoided him. She told us the reason she avoided him was that she was too mortified about having thrown up. “I was almost disgusted myself and it was like the—for me, it was the most awful moment. Like it was the most mortifying moment ever. . . . Like, I was more mortified. Like, my immediate reaction was, oh, my god: I’m so embarrassed. Rather than, oh, my god, he, like, practically sexually assaulted me.” Beatrice told her story to one other person: a friend who was adamant that Beatrice had been assaulted, and that she should report what happened. But this interpretation didn’t sit well with Beatrice. She firmly told us that she did not feel “traumatized by it.” She continues to tell the story to friends, but, admittedly, omits crucial details. “Like, I’ve told people the story of, like, how I threw up over this guy’s room. . . . But I didn’t tell anyone else more detail than that . . . just that I threw up over this guy’s room and then this guy tries to ask me out later.” Beatrice had decided to help Alexei “finish.” But his kissing her and trying to have sex with her when she was passed out is a textbook definition of assault. So too is persisting after she’d said “no.” Beatrice made a choice not to think of it this way, to reject her friend’s label.
We are not mental health professionals and we were not doing clinical research; we can’t know if this refusal to label was effectively self-protective or if it inadvertently amplified the harm of the assault.15 Our focus is the social landscape. The vast majority of the students who shared with us their experiences of being assaulted described suffering, particularly those who had never spoken to anyone about what had happened. We heard of suicidal thoughts, of grades collapsing, of deep depression. We were concerned about the extremely detached way that some of the students told us about what they’d experienced. There were real horror stories. But we nonetheless stop well short of saying that people like Boutros, Tim, Beatrice, Adam, or Karen are living a lie. They are living the truth they want to live.
Students who don’t want to call what happened to them “rape” or “sexual assault” are unlikely to seek out services at places designated to help them, like a “rape crisis center.” We’re not arguing for the need to rename these centers—such names are symbolically important. But for those who don’t think of what happened as “rape” and don’t feel like they’re in “crisis,” then finding places of support, staffed by people who have the necessary expertise to help, can be a significant challenge. This can prevent many from getting the help they need.
It also has consequences for prevention. People like Alexei are unlikely to be told that they’re committing assaults. Alexei was “lucky” in that Beatrice rejected her friend’s interpretation and did not report her experience. Alexei may view the nonconsensual sex he had with her as “normal.” He’s playing a game of roulette, perhaps without even knowing it: while Beatrice told us she didn’t experience her encounter with Alexei as particularly harmful, the stories we heard suggest that plenty of others would have felt differently.
It’s helpful to think of this within our ecological framework.16 We saw students making decisions because of worries of losing their friends, of not identifying the “right” way, of imposing a polluted identity on a current or former loved one, of being seen as “that girl” or “that guy,” of being perceived as naïve, inexperienced, or ridiculous. Rather than pressure people to report their experiences, or to embrace the identity of a survivor, we might organize our communities in ways that help those who have experienced an assault to put themselves more firmly in the center of their decision making. There’s no right way to experience the aftermath of a sexual assault; a first principle in supporting those who have been assaulted is not to impose even more upon those who have already borne so much.
Heterosexual men face their own challenges in making sense of what happens to them. Their victimization is often hard for others to see, or even to imagine. In Chapter 1 we described Tim’s drifting in and out of consciousness as, in his words, a woman “sat on my face.” He was clear in labeling it an assault and adamant that he couldn’t talk about it or report it.17 He’d been very drunk, and his memory was cloudy at best. But what would happen if he reported his experience? “All she has to say is, ‘He was drunk, he doesn’t remember, he raped me,’ right?” Tim felt that the gendered scripts in which men were always assumed to want sex, combined with what he perceived to be a double standard when it came to drunkenness, would work against him. If he admitted to being drunk and having sex, he’d basically be admitting to having committed a rape. Tim had talked about his experience with a counselor and was okay about it now. But it still bothered him that he felt he couldn’t report what happened to him because he was a man.
Tim has good reasons to understand his experience this way. But reporting is hard for almost everyone.18 A question everyone who has been assaulted seems to ask themselves—and, in many cases, their peers—is, in our language, “What kind of projects are available to me after this?” They are concerned about their life projects, their college projects, and their sexual projects. Within a university setting young people have academic and career goals, identity goals, and extracurricular interests. They’re also part of formal student organizations that are meaningful to them, and whose reputations are at stake. Students talked to us about their already stressful lives, how little time they had, and how they often felt barely able to stay afloat.19 Adding one more thing was just too much. With their many other commitments and activities, as well as their already taxed emotional capacity, most decided that they’d be better off allocating their energy to other goals, ones that might actually result in something positive and advantageous in the long run, ones where they had more control over the outcome. As one young woman put it decisively, “Dealing with public safety? Dealing with the police? That would just add too much to my plate.” For most students, their primary concern in the aftermath of an assault is not to mount a moral crusade or use it as an opportunity for political activism. Our students were consummate rational actors, submerging these painful and upsetting experiences, along with many others, to optimize their time in college and to avoid the time and emotional costs of having a more public conversation about what had happened to them. The low probability of being able to successfully get what they wanted out of the reporting process was particularly important in students’ calculations. Campus inequalities played a big part in this.
Tanique was on “full aid.” In her sophomore year she was assaulted by someone she described as a “big man on campus.” He was rich. When his parents showed up on campus, they were frequently greeted by senior administrators. And beyond his economic and institutional power, he had social power. He was “hot.” People liked him. His big smile, sharp clothes, and air of confidence without arrogance made him someone everyone wanted to be around. When he expressed sexual interest in her, Tanique was excited, even giddy. But after he sexually assaulted her, she came to see his power as something far different than sexiness. She told us she just couldn’t afford the personal investment in presenting her side against him. Why put in the effort? His social status meant that other students weren’t likely to say much against him in an investigation. Even with Columbia’s guaranteed provision of an attorney-advisor at no cost to students who cannot afford to hire their own, she imagined the kind of high-powered New York lawyers he could hire—to say nothing of his family’s long-running connections to the school. Tanique figured that even if she put everything she had into holding him accountable, he would have more, and the power imbalance would lead to her losing.20
The diversification of the student body has made for more representative and learning-rich environments, but also more unequal ones. The rich have gotten far richer, making these inequalities that much more extreme. Students see that. They live with it every day. Some wealthier students, unhappy with their lottery number for picking their dorm room, have their parents buy them an apartment near campus—or even better, in the “cooler” parts of town. If they can afford that, students like Tanique reason, think of everything else they can afford: lawyers to defend them, investigators to dig up dirt. It just wasn’t worth it to Tanique. She was beginning to feel at home at Columbia before she was assaulted. But that had all changed. Her grades had slipped and it was hard to motivate herself to try or care. What had been her opportunity to “make it” had become more of a jail sentence; a little more than a year and she’d be out of here. She couldn’t wait.
What happened when people actually did have contact with authorities—security, police, or the central office responsible for investigating and evaluating cases? Sadly, the answer was: not much that was good for the person who reported.21 Our study was conducted on one campus, but we don’t believe that Columbia is any worse than any other school. Moreover, the study design was likely to elicit responses from those who were most dissatisfied with their experience, whose “having a story to tell” provided a way to share ire toward the university itself. Those who reported, found justice, and were satisfied with the experience may simply have been too busy, or not seen a need to participate in our study.
Before turning to the experiences of those we did hear from, we think it’s important to look at these processes from the perspective of investigating bodies, according them the same respect we’ve tried to give everyone with whom we spoke. As researchers our job is not to impose our viewpoints onto people, but instead to try to understand and convey their point of view. This doesn’t mean we stand outside of judgment, or that we refrain from making arguments about what we think is happening. But our task is to make sense of why people and organizations do what they do.
Those who are accused have rights. The rates of false accusation are incredibly low; estimates within the scholarly literature float around one in twenty.22 But they’re not zero. And so investigators ask victims to tell their story. These are not just any investigators. In response to complaints about students being questioned by faculty or deans untrained in the area of sexual assault, Columbia has hired former sex crimes investigators, trained in trauma-informed interviewing. They get the story directly from the person who reported, known as the complainant. Then they ask the respondent to tell their story. Then they ask the complainant again, because the stories don’t usually line up perfectly. The person who reported their experience of being assaulted is likely to feel like they’re being doubted.23 They have to go over details again and again. They have to deal with new details that they didn’t mention the first time around. Third parties are brought in. And then there are more questions. Memories are often hazy.24 Observers aren’t exactly reliable. The process drags on. Our legal system uses what scholars call an adversarial process. This is not an accident; it was designed so that the parties involved argue before a neutral evaluator, each seeking to advance their own interest. There’s little about the process that pushes both parties toward a shared understanding. Instead, people are forced to advocate. It is contentious by design. And when the stakes include getting expelled, or being suspended and then returning to face the label of “rapist” or “predator” as a “fucking social pariah” (or, for the person filing the complaint, being called a “psycho” or a “liar”), the process becomes even more adversarial.
Experiences of trauma can impact memories and narratives.25 People who have experienced trauma rarely provide consistent accounts of what they have experienced; they often do not recall critical details. We saw this ourselves when we did two or three interviews with students who had experienced multiple sexual assaults. New details emerged. Others dropped out of the account. And ours was a low-stakes context—not a highly stressful one where students have to advocate for their position against someone else’s, while being questioned repeatedly about “what happened” when sometimes their memories are fragmented. It’s nearly unendurable for the students who report having been assaulted.26 But it’s also nearly impossible for investigators. The steps required to help those harmed get what they need—which typically involves affirming their experience—run directly counter to the legal procedures of “blind” justice. And coming to a decision about what happened is no simpler. If one person says, emphatically, “It didn’t happen that way,” the investigators have to listen. In an adversarial process where the stakes are high, the accused will almost certainly take that position. There’s no easy path through an investigation to a conclusion. This is part of why our emphasis is not on adjudication.
One woman put it succinctly: “One, it’s ridiculous that it’s an investigative process because that means that someone can literally get a lawyer and argue against my experiences. Two, it’s traumatic.” In the last two chapters we wrote about Rebecca, who was raped by two friends who offered to walk her home. She reported what happened to her to the university office that managed investigations and student discipline, to the Office of Gender Based Misconduct, and to the local police. During the university investigation, her friends were brought in, including Jed, who continued to maintain that she had not been assaulted, even though his only evidence was what the two men had told him. Both of the accused had admitted that they had had sex with Rebecca, but maintained that she was a willing, even eager participant. They denied that she was going in and out of consciousness. It all became too much, and Rebecca wanted it to end. The police did not pursue a full investigation; they determined that there wasn’t enough to indict, especially as Rebecca didn’t cooperate with them. Rebecca did not want to be part of Columbia’s investigation either, especially as it dragged on far more slowly than she wished, but she was told that the university investigation would continue with or without her. This is understandable, of course, since the university would want to address a situation where a student had reported being raped. But while it was in the interest of the university to continue, Rebecca’s attitude was fatalistic:
Every step of the way, I’ve been like, “Oh, I wish I wasn’t doing this. But, like, I have to be.” There’s no alternative ’cause . . . I can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. That’s unrealistic. So, I was like, “I have to deal with it no matter what, and the process really sucks, but, like, it’s the only thing that they have. So, I just have to do it.”
She did experience some benefits to reporting; both she and one of the accused men were student athletes, and the university coordinated her team’s travel so she didn’t have to be on the same bus with his team. But the constant questions weighed upon her. She felt like she had to justify her drinking as something other than “out of control.” Her friends felt that they had to pick sides, and so the social network that should have been a source of support was collapsing around her. She felt unable to participate fully in student life because her assailants were still on campus. It was relentless. At the time of our interview the outcome of the university investigation had yet to be determined, but Rebecca claimed she didn’t care what it was. The whole experience had just made things worse. The aftermath was worse, Rebecca told us, than the rape. She had lost many of her friends, her sense of herself, her connection to her school, and at times, her will to keep going.
Rebecca was like a lot of students, whose primary complaint was that no one listened to what they wanted. Their voice wasn’t heard. The first violation of their autonomy was the assault. And then they went through an adjudication process where their voice was challenged. Even if they wanted it to stop, it didn’t. This felt like a second violation.27
Other than Rebecca, only one other person we spoke to reported what happened to the police. This reflects how rarely that happens. The police are informed of reported assaults on campus, but victims rarely cooperate. The one woman who did explained why, in her opinion, the police are even worse.28
We mentioned Cindy’s story in the opening of this chapter. She was raped off campus by someone who didn’t attend Columbia. She immediately labeled her experience as a rape, told friends and family, went to the hospital for medical care and a sexual assault forensic exam, and filed a police report. She did so without hesitation. “This is what you’re supposed to do,” she told us. Cindy felt compelled by a duty to community and to the justice that the police could provide. But instead, she found the police not only unhelpful, but coercive. The detectives assigned to her case wanted her to call her assailant in an attempt to get him to incriminate himself as they listened in on the call. She didn’t want to; she didn’t want any contact, real or pretend, with him. The whole thing felt “gross.” She said they put enormous pressure on her. She held firm. She said she told the police officer, “‘No. I’m not doing it.’ But the officer was just, like, pressuring me over and over and over again.” It was over a year later when she spoke with us. She now understands why so many people don’t want to go to the police, or report to anyone. “Now I understand because my first instinct was, ‘go to the police; that makes sense.’” But after what she experienced, she described the aftermath in two simple words: “It’s horrible.”
Students’ experiences of assault, like their practices of consent, can’t be removed from their broader experiences in life. Assaults can amplify other frequent experiences of not being heard, respected, listened to, or considered. Such experiences are not limited to women, LGBTQ students, students of color, and students from working-class backgrounds, but they are more common among those groups. And reporting, at times, augmented the feeling that no one listened, or that your experiences were not respected. We saw the positive cultural ripple effects of a sustained public conversation about sexual assault on campus, of survivors coming forward, and of clear institutional messages that nonconsensual sex is not acceptable. These effects were stronger for women than for men, whose experiences of being assaulted are still often illegible to peers. Still, most students drew upon their peers to collectively mull over and label their experience.29 Rebecca didn’t know how to make sense of what had happened to her. And her friends worked hard to interpret the event for her. For the vast majority of students we spoke with, the aftermath involves collective interpretation, with pressures typically toward keeping the peace rather than raising the alarm.
But there’s an important yet under-discussed consequence to all this work that peers do: the community burden of assault. Friends carry each other’s burdens, and it is a heavy weight. People work to minimize the effects assaults have on their college and sexual projects. As Claude Mellins’s analysis of SHIFT survey data shows, more than one in three women and one in six men on campus were assaulted by senior year; on average, those who were assaulted were assaulted two or three times; and 80% of students who were assaulted told at least someone; the stories of assault thus touch almost every corner of the university community.30 We noticed the impact of this in our fieldwork. Students realized that their friends might be too exhausted to be willing or able to help process their experiences and the aftermath. After she was assaulted, Jeannie sought out her best friend to talk. But the conversation quickly turned to her friend’s far more violent experience of being raped—which Jeannie hadn’t even known about. She was glad her friend could finally tell her about what happened, but it resulted in putting her own story, and her own processing of what happened to her, on hold. “I told one of my female friends and she just, like, had a war story. She had a story that was, like, a more violent story. And she just kind of missed mine because hers was worse. I felt, like, less able to, like, I don’t know. . . .”
This sheds new light on the most common reason students had for not reporting what happened to them: it didn’t seem important enough. After hearing other students’ “war stories,” young people may minimize their own experiences. We found that some friend groups had become so emotionally oversaturated that individuals in those groups did not feel comfortable talking about their own experiences anymore. As we concluded our conversation with Jeannie she said, “I stopped talking to my female friends about it because they just, like, all had their own stuff going on. . . . And it didn’t seem important to them.” When pressed, it wasn’t that she thought her friends didn’t care about her. Their capacity to care had been maxed out. When Jeannie left the interview, she, like so many subjects, seemed relieved. She had finally had the chance to talk to someone.
Diana, the woman who assaulted her gay best friend, who had that weird experience with the guy sticking a banana in her mouth, and who was summarily handed her clothes after that freshman-year “alpha male shit,” stopped having sex after she began to reflect on her actions. But she’s incredibly rare—both in her capacity to reflect on her behavior, and in opting to stop having sex entirely. In fact, since those who are assaulted tend to be victimized many times, there’s plenty of evidence that they continue to enter into sexual situations.31 This also means that many people on campus also manage and experience sex with survivors.32
In most instances, of course, people don’t know that their sexual partner is also a survivor. In Chapter 6, which dealt with the perspectives of people who assault, we met Elliot. After being found responsible for committing assault, he told his potential sexual partners about it. We suspect this is relatively rare—both for those who have been accused and for survivors. We never heard a story of someone saying to a hookup or a date, “Before we do this I need you to know that I was raped last year.” It’s not like survivors want to relive their trauma before a consensual sexual encounter. But as relationships progress, partners talk about their past experiences. And in small communities, rumors about past experiences spread.
Fran, whose story we recounted in Chapter 1, was raped in ninth grade and was now a few years into sobriety. She spoke about the intimacy she developed with her boyfriend: “I had to learn how to have sex and not, like, disassociate myself completely. That was really hard, but he was someone I could be honest with, like, ‘I have a hard time being intimate with guys.’ And he gets that, and we have been able to work on it together.” But that was inseparable from his being sober too, and the fact that this was different than any other relationship she’d ever had with a man. “This was the first time I was ever honest with guys about, just even what’s going on, or even if I had a bad day.” Her sponsor in AA had prodded her: “‘Okay, like, what kind of woman do you wanna be? Let’s, like, grow into that.’” Fran continued, saying, “That in itself has been really healing, sexually too, ’cause now I enjoy having sex, and I don’t feel pressured to do it.” As she told her story, we heard her talk about finally claiming her sexual citizenship.
When I was first in that relationship, I’d always pressure myself, in my head, “I need to have sex to please him, otherwise he’ll leave me,” whatever, ’cause I was so used to thinking that. And then when I found out, oh, it’s okay to be like, “No, I don’t wanna have sex tonight” and he’s totally loving and supportive of that, and it’s like, wow—I had never done that before . . . so much of my life and decisions, before that, it was just like, “oh this is the only option.” . . . So figuring out that “oh, I can actually do what I wanna do, especially in a relationship with a guy,” and actually viewing my partner as someone equal to me, rather than either me trying to control them, or me trying to get something from them . . . like, actually viewing them honestly as another human being who—my actions affect him. Like, that was totally novel to me, literally I thought men did not have feelings, and I could not hurt them.
For Fran, as a survivor of sexual assault and someone healing from substance use disorder, learning to have sex as a choice was part of seeing herself as self-determining, but also seeing a man as “honestly another human being.”
Jaffe looked like a native Coloradan—slouchy knit beanie, hiking boots, and plaid shirt. Active in citywide social justice movements, his initial response to an invitation to be interviewed was to voice suspicion about what a study funded by the university would want from him, or whether his comments would even be listened to. Once in the interview, though, he was thoughtful and reflective, talking about his interest in learning “why social change happens and how to bring . . . decolonization.” He’d recently become a vegetarian, on principle: “It didn’t make sense to me to eat another conscious being without its consent and just based on my own group membership in this species, this is the same sort of mentality that, you know, colonizers used, it’s the same type of mentality that makes violence against other people.” His intentionality in his diet reflected a certain consistency in his awareness of the impacts of his actions on the world around him. He wasn’t the only student who shared with us what it was like to navigate sex with a survivor, but his story stood out both for the concern he expressed for his girlfriend’s physical and emotional experience, as well as for his honesty about his own distress.
He met his girlfriend at one of the bike racks outside of Lerner Hall. The rack was so crowded that their bike pedals had gotten stuck in each other’s wheels. Each rushing to get somewhere, they had to stop and shift all the bikes one by one—all of course still locked to the rack—so that they could untangle their two. He’d put his helmet on already when she blurted out, “Can I get your number?” and whipped out her phone. Shortly thereafter, as Jaffe tells it, they “got coffee and watched a movie together and eventually . . . started hooking up, we were in her bed and it was getting intense and so I reached for her belt. And she said, ‘No.’ And so I stopped. She said she just wasn’t ready yet, and so we stopped.” He continued:
To be honest, the first few times weren’t great . . . it took her a while to get into it. She had had some very bad sexual experiences before that, so it was hard for her to get into it. . . . She told me she had never orgasmed before having sex with me, it was hard for her to even think that sex is about her pleasure. . . . That’s been a process, but it’s been a lot better, it just takes communication, and at times we would have to stop, but if she ever felt uncomfortable about it, I told her she could tell me and then we would stop.
The transcript runs on for several pages as he describes the care with which he makes space for her to articulate what she wants: “It’s been like this often, even today, we’ll just ask each other, do you want to? Or, like, I want you, do you want me? And then just go from there. Sometimes you just feel it and there’s not as much verbal communication. . . . There have been times where we’ve had to stop, but it’s always been, like, we are both open to communicating before, during, and after.” Asked for an example of how it actually works, in the moment where they stop, he lays out in greater depth some of what she’s managing:
Like I said, my girlfriend has a lot of—has had a lot of really bad sexual experiences before, and so sometimes she will get flashbacks because she has post-traumatic stress disorder. In those instances, she sometimes becomes very upset during sex. One time, she even started crying. And we’ll stop and be like “Hey, what’s up? What are you thinking right now? What are you feeling?” And we’ll talk about it. This actually happened recently over the break. And I said, “Hey, you know, this really upset me as well. Maybe we should stop for a little bit.” But in the end she didn’t want to stop. . . . In some ways she feels like she doesn’t want her PTSD and her previous experience to get in the way of our relationship. And I want to give her space to work that out. But if she feels like she’s ready, then, that’s okay with me as well. But yeah, like I said, it’s still a struggle to get through that rough place.
For all his intentional self-reflection, our conversations with Jaffe accentuated that people are a bundle of contradictions. When asked if he’d had any sexual interactions that he regretted, he told a story where at the very end he admitted that the sex was not fully consensual. His whole telling of the story was halting, full of turns and corrections. In the end, he was insistent that what mattered is that he did not feel hurt:
I was just hanging out with some friends. There was this girl who my other friend was into and I—I thought she was cute but I didn’t really know her. She messaged me on Facebook once. And we had, like, a very brief conversation. I had seen her around but I’d never really talked to her. And so we’re just chilling. We got some wine, and we literally started drinking and we were chilling on my friend’s bed and then just all of a sudden she was—her face was on my face and she was just making out with me. And I was like, I should—this is I guess what I want. Like, I would be down for this. It wasn’t like—but I didn’t even have time to think about, and I didn’t want her emotionally, necessarily, because there was no time for that to develop. And it was also just weird because my friends were there and they were like, um, okay?
We asked, “Like, in the same room?” And he answered emphatically, “Yeah, like on the same bed!” And then he continued:
And then yeah, it was really weird. She just took me down to her room and she got a condom and we did it. And yeah, it was really weird the next day, as you might imagine . . . I just left. She really didn’t want me to leave, but I was, like, I don’t know what just happened, I needed some time to think about it. And she stole my shirt and she still has it. [He pauses, and laughs.] “Yeah, I just left. We didn’t really talk about it, and I think she defriended me on Facebook. Like I said, my friends were there, so they knew it had happened. . . . I guess my friend who was in the group was upset about it, but it’s whatever.
When asked how he felt about it, his answer was revealing:
Uh, it’s fine. It’s been a while—I don’t—I, I feel fine about it and I don’t feel hurt. I hope she doesn’t harbor hard feelings about it, but if I felt anything, she brought that on me and I—before I could think about it and I didn’t—like that was the only instance I would probably say I felt like I wasn’t fully giving my consent while it was happening, but . . . it felt weird, but I don’t feel hurt or anything.
His experience encapsulates so much of what we are trying to illustrate. There’s such a stark contrast between his attentiveness to the real and ongoing harm that his girlfriend experienced as a result of her own “very bad sexual experiences” and his assessment of his own experience of being relatively unscathed by having been pressed and rushed into sex he did not choose. We see how friends are affected, and how one of his primary concerns in this sexual interaction—both before and after—was the impact it would have on his circle of friends. The notion of men’s responsibility for sex is so ingrained that even in describing a situation in which the young woman was clearly the one who propelled the interaction forward, he feels compelled to note that he “hopes she doesn’t harbor hard feelings” and that “if anything, she brought that on him”—as if even in being coerced someone still could hold him responsible for what happened.
In the aftermath of an assault, students who are assaulted struggle with their identity. Being a victim, they imagine rightly or wrongly, can close off some doors and make certain futures more difficult. Many want to be heard, to have what happened be recognized, and to get the help they need. But they also want to go on with their “normal” life and try as much as possible to preserve their former self. Their friendships are both more important and more fragile than ever—this is the moment they need the most support, and yet stories of assaults have the potential to fracture friend groups. Social continuation often wins out over social rupture. Sometimes silences emerge because friendship communities are just too overburdened. But maintaining one’s life, college, and sexual projects aren’t the only concern. How people experience the aftermath of assault is fundamentally tied to how they imagine their reaction and their conceptualization of what happened will influence their identity.
An analysis of the SHIFT survey data led by Shamus and Aaron Sarvet found that 57% of students who described an assault indicated that it affected their life in some way.33 We use the word “victim” sparingly, referring more commonly to the “person who was assaulted” to describe what activists call “survivor” in part because “survivor” transforms victimhood into an identity—one that many do not want to embrace. This suggests the utility of moving away from an understanding of assault organized around identity categories such as “survivor” or “perpetrator” and toward categories of experiences.34 About twenty years ago, HIV researchers and activists began using the phrase “men who have sex with men” instead of the category “gay men.”35 Their reason was simple: many men who have sex with men don’t identify as gay, and so won’t be reached effectively by talking about the risks of HIV among “gay men” or among men who engage in “gay sex.” Similarly, people might not talk about or even think of what happened to them as “assault” or define themselves as “survivors.” Instead of pushing them to do so, we need to think about how we can use language and an understanding of their experience that helps them get the assistance they need.
For all victims we spoke with, regardless of how they labeled their experience, there was so much self-blame. They drank too much. They were naïve. They didn’t protest or fight back. One widespread and well-meaning impulse upon hearing people blame themselves is to tell them not to. But that is an invalidating response; when people blame themselves, they are giving us valuable information about what they experience as the social failures that lay behind their vulnerabilities. When victims talk about their excessive drinking, that’s important to hear because it can reflect challenges with addiction, or it could be related to mental health struggles—to sadness, or depression.36 Yet in other instances, excessive drinking is about an intense discomfort with sexuality. Such discomfort is socially produced, and thus potentially modifiable. Victims aren’t at fault. But the reasons they blame themselves point to critical opportunities to transform the sexual landscape. A major element of that transformation involves addressing the power disparities among students—both those shaped by campus life, and those with much deeper roots.