“No one has the right to hurt you. You have the right to feel better.”
This is what Benje Douglas, Bowdoin’s director of gender violence prevention and education tells all sexual assault and abuse survivors. It would be a simple, almost poetic sentiment if it were not so painful.
When I interviewed Douglas a few weeks back for a class assignment, I was asking specifically about how he talks to survivors of sexual violence, but his words have resonated with me on a multitude of other issues.
This year alone, photos of the nude bodies of a number of female celebrities were released on the Internet, a student at University of Virginia (UVA) described how she was brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party during her freshmen year, and a black 18-year-old body lay on a street in Ferguson, Missouri for over four hours.
These events have done nothing but remind us that this country privileges certain bodies with an excess of power, and allows them to exert themselves violently over other bodies—specifically those women, transgender men and women, queers and people of color. The perpetrators of these events more often than not go unpunished, which signals to the masses that no, you do not have the right to feel better and yes, someone does have the right to hurt you.
Under what circumstances does someone have the right to hurt you? For the above events, the narratives presented by the media blame the victim and vindicate the perpetrator. The media manages to obscure truth with a sleight of hand, momentarily manipulating the power imbalance by holding the victim accountable.
Sexual violence survivors have become familiar with this kind of victim-blaming, specifically what Douglas calls “participatory victimization,” comparable to being blamed “when you leave the key in the ignition and your car gets stolen.”
The problematic rhetoric he said he often hears from survivors who have internalized their own role in their assault is “I shouldn’t have been doing this, why did I call my ex-boyfriend…”
When Jackie told her story about being gang raped by seven men at UVA to Rolling Stone, she described how her friends would find her crying and ask, “You’re still upset about that?” and “Why didn’t you have fun with it?” Not only was Jackie held accountable for being raped, she was portrayed as a threat to the university when her roommate asked her, “Do you want to be responsible for something that’s gonna paint UVA in a bad light?”
When officer Darren Wilson told the grand jury what he saw right before he killed Michael Brown with six gunshots, he described Brown’s face as “the most intense aggressive face” and said Brown looked “like a demon.” These words invoke a white perception of blacks as “a supernatural threat,” a phenomenon that was examined in a study at Northwestern University.
Wilson’s testimony recasts him as the victim and Brown, unarmed and with his hands up, as the demon. For this and other reasons, the jury chose not to indict Darren Wilson, the supposed victim.
Whether you are comfortable with it or not, I hope you recognize that you are a part of a country that has given certain bodies to have a degree of excessive, unearned power. As a Bowdoin student, society has arbitrarily decided that your life is more valuable than somebody who is less educated. The key word is arbitrarily. No life is more or less valuable than the next one.
Please understand that beyond these power structures that have shifted blame to the victim, real people with real lives are hurting. Survivors still have to walk around their campuses, places they call home, with their rapists possibly living in the dorm next door. Michael Brown’s family still has to hear their dead son be demonized by a murderer who told ABC News that he has “a clear conscience.”
Please understand that many of these marginalized individuals, be they sexual violence survivors, people of color or members of an oppressed group, live on Bowdoin’s campus and hurt every day.
In order to return power to members of these groups who live on this campus, the student body needs to demonstrate broader immediate support. Not speaking out and acting out is sheer apathy about issues where people’s lives and well-being are at stake. Always assume you have the legitimacy to be concerned about other people’s struggles and recognize it is in your interest to participate in groups like A.D.D.R.E.S.S. and Safe Space, just to name two.
We need you, even if you are not a person of color or a survivor of sexual violence. Do not look away when we are talking about the lives of your peers.
Elina Zhang is a member of the Class of 2016.