There is currently a Pajama Jammy Jam going on right outside my residence hall.
Instead of attending, I am currently sitting in my empty room typing this up, because I'm just the slightest bit sick to my stomach from the sexual assault awareness assembly the entire freshman class of University of Redlands just attended.
I have to give the "Active Bystander" presentation props for trying. Because they really did try.
But they didn't do well.
"Remember," they assured us, "if you feel uncomfortable you can always get up and go to the back where counselors are waiting to help you at any time."
Because drawing attention to yourself by standing up in a sea of seated students and walking down the aisle with eyes on your back is not uncomfortable at all. Because being encouraged to walk back down that pathway and settle into your seat like nothing happened definitely doesn't draw attention to you.
If that wasn't bad enough, the content of the presentation was sorely lacking.
The only sexual assault they talked about was rape. There was no conversation about unwanted sexual touching, and not the slightest implication that sexual assault could absolutely be verbal.
Instead of teaching us how to be a supportive friend to survivors, they focused on how not to react — great in theory, but many of us, including me, were left in the dark about the "right way" to go about supporting survivors.
Instead of they unwittingly reinforced the "it'll never happen to me" mentality by mostly focusing on how to handle situations when a survivor comes to you, and not what to do when you're the survivor that needs help.
But the biggest problem I had with the assembly?
Not a word was said about rape culture.
Because people make rape jokes like the people standing next to them have never or will never deal with sexual assault (but of course they have, of course they will, because if it's not you, it's going to be your family. Your friends. Someone you care about and love either has been or will be sexually assaulted in your life, and the statistics get worse if they're LGBT, women, in college, or any combination of those).
Because "well, what were you wearing? How much were you drinking?" are normal questions survivors get bombarded with even as they're trying desperately to block out the voices that scream IT'S YOUR FAULT YOU DESERVED IT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE BETTER YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE LET IT HAPPEN over and over in their heads.
Because even though we've been trying to scream back "it's never the victim's fault," men slip past prison sentences after consciously making the decision to violate someone else's body.
Because I became a statistic at age 13 and never told anyone until years later.
I suppose it's a little strange that I don't consider myself a survivor of sexual assault. Partially because it was "just" verbal, and maybe it qualifies as harassment more than assault because of it; mostly because I didn't know what was even happening at the time. I didn't have a name for it back then, and he asked me not to breathe a word of it to anyone, so like an idiot I promptly agreed and shoved it far into the back of my mind until it resurfaced years later.
It's all fine now. It doesn't affect my daily life. But things like this — where my experiences are ignored or forgotten or invisible in a presentation as important and unfortunately necessary as sexual assault — bring it back up, and I find myself intensely uncomfortable with listening to people who sound like they're reading off a script of what sexual assault is "supposed" to be like.
The reality is, sexual assault comes in many different forms. Too many, and too often. That's why these awareness programs are necessary.
They just need to get a little bit better, is all.
