We have previously posted about the inadequacies of many college and university justice systems when it comes to the issue of sexual assault.
We found this very interesting article by Jaclyn Friedman, who talks about the issue and recounts her personal experience as a sexual assault survivor:
I’d heard horror stories about victims being grilled in excruciating detail about their sexual histories, as if anything a woman may have done in her past made her fair game to be raped in the present. But I got lucky on that front: My assailant agreed to plead no contest to the charges if I agreed to hear him out. So I spent a dark hour and a half in a dean’s office, barely breathing while the guy who’d violated me wept about his family history of alcoholism. A few days later, the dean of students called me to say that the guy had been expelled for a year (the amount of time I had left at school) but that I mustn’t speak of the case — or the punishment — to anybody.
Grateful that I would no longer have to see my attacker around campus, I didn’t think to question the sentence or the muzzle at the time. But as I began to heal, I encountered survivors of on-campus sexual violence who had been taken even less seriously than I had by the system. Gag order or no, I began to speak out about my experience and advocate for change. And then, without warning, my assailant reappeared on campus, turning my last semester into a haze of fear, hiding and post-traumatic stress.
Read the complete Washington Post story.
