On Hierarchies of Trauma

Last year, my student group hosted a screening of The Hunting Ground on our campus. My best friend and I sat in the back of the theater, held hands, and cried. The movie was, and is, powerful and important; it undoubtedly deserves the attention it has received.

Which is why I was so disappointed when I read this article from the duo behind the film.

Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering embark on an admirable project, seeking to respond to those who deny the realities of campus sexual assault and, specifically, who deny the data that tells us about the scope of the problem.

I believe that their goals are commendable, and for the most part, they deal with the deniers well. At one point, though, they write the following:

Rape deniers try to dismiss these studies because they include some “lesser assaults” like groping and forced kissing in their numbers. But the truth is those assaults are just a small minority of all those recorded; most assaults in college are rape and attempted rape, which are felonies.

Yes, lesser assaults is in quotes. They go on, however, to assert that those so-called lesser assaults are a small minority of recorded assaults. They respond to criticisms of tallies that include those assaults by dismissing them. Essentially, they seem to be saying that most of the recorded assaults are real assaults, felony assaults, and therefore critiques of the data based on the inclusion of so-called lesser assaults are not valid. They respond to these critiques by affirming that some types of assault don’t really count.

I fell asleep in a friend’s dorm room one night, and I woke up, disoriented, to find him on top of me, kissing me and groping me. Does that not “count” because he didn’t rape me?

I do not believe that it is our right as activists and advocates to create hierarchies of sexual assault, or to dictate who is allowed to feel what level of trauma. It is not up to us to decide what is “bad enough” to count, what is “bad enough” to warrant trauma. True, Dick and Ziering do not explicitly state that those who experience forcible kissing or groping do not have the right to be traumatized, but they nonetheless engage in minimizing the experience of those who have experienced such an assault.

Some people do not experience rape as particularly traumatic, others might experience forcible kissing or groping as very much so. As people concerned with justice for survivors, we must recognize the right of each person to process violence and violation on their own terms.

What is more, the claim that serious assault is equivalent to felony assault is strangely at odds with the work of many activists working against campus gender-based violence. Many such activists (myself included) seek to strengthen school-based civil options for survivors, which provide an alternative to reporting sexual assault to the police (or provide a parallel process for survivors who feel that making a report to the police is right for them). For many of us, this is a central tenet of our activism – we are working to create options for survivors to seek justice outside of a criminal legal system that too often perpetuates violence and marginalization, and that often doesn’t work in the ways survivors need it to. Some instances of campus gender-based violence are felonies, all are a violation of civil rights, and the activists I know and work with are seeking to deal with the civil rights issue, while also supporting those survivors who do choose to report to the police. The construction of serious instances of gender-based violence on campus as felonious instances of gender-based violence is a false equivalence for a movement grounded in civil rights.

As activists and advocates – and I do not think it is a stretch to include Dick and Ziering in that group – we should not be dismissing the experiences and trauma of survivors of sexual assault. Instead, we should be affirming that all survivors’ experiences are valid, and we should be upholding their civil right to equal access to education. Trauma is not reserved for those who are raped; and not all who are raped experience lasting trauma. But all students – all people – have the right to education free from gender-based violence, and all survivors of gender-based violence have a right to process that violence in their own way, in their own time. Our response to those who dismiss important survey data on the basis of the inclusion of so-called lesser assaults should not be to confirm the hierarchy of assault that they have created, it should be to correct them; to tell them that we cannot control how people will react to a violation of their bodies, we cannot create a spectrum of trauma, and these assaults do count. These assaults are not acceptable, and they are no less a violation of the civil rights that require schools to adjudicate reports of sexual assault because they are not felonies.

Those who dismiss campus sexual assault on the grounds that data includes lesser assaults are not “misreading the data,” as Dick and Ziering claim. They are reading it accurately and dismissing the impact of certain kinds of assault. I am disappointed that Dick and Ziering are doing the same.