Students stage walkout over Oklahoma high school’s treatment of three rape survivors

(Photo credit: KFOR.com)

In an inspiring show of solidarity — and a depressing indictment of both their fellow students and their school’s administration — a group of students is staging a walkout at a Norman, Oklahoma high school this morning to protest the way the community has treated three girls who were raped by a classmate. ThinkProgress reports:

Student organizers are standing in solidarity with three rape victims who say they were assaulted by the same male student. Although school administrators did suspend the alleged assailant, activists are concerned about the fact that the teen girls have faced bullying and harassment from other students since coming forward with their stories.

After a video of one of the assaults was posted online and passed around the high school, students labeled one of the victims as a “slut” and a “whore.” She was herself suspended after she punched a student who came up to her and said, “I hear you love being raped in the ass.” Another victim claims a school administrator told her it would be better for her to stay home until tensions “blow over.”

At this point, according to the family members and friends of the three victims, the teens have all left Norman High School because the hostile environment there became too difficult for them to face. “They’re struggling, they’re having a really tough time,” student organizer Danielle Brown said at a recent press conference. “They want to come to school and they can’t.”

Jezebel has a detailed (and triggering) account of the assaults and cruel aftermath that has driven the survivors out of school.

Tales of rape survivors facing harassment from their peers — particularly among high schoolers — have become so commonplace, I fear this revictimization is becoming just as normalized as sexual violence itself — newsworthy only in the extreme cases, like those of Audrie Pott and Rehteah Parsons, when it actually, literally kills people. That’s certainly how Norman High seems to have treated it. Despite the fact that the school supposedly has a “zero tolerance” anti-bullying policy, while the girls faced a widespread campaign of slut-shaming and deliberate silencing (one was warned to “watch her back” if she talked about the assault), school officials did little more than advise them to “come back when it calms down next semester” and “just focus on your schoolwork and ignore all these people.”

Today’s walkout is organized by activists behind the Facebook group Yes All Daughters and participants will be Tweeting and Instagraming using the #yesalldaughters hashtag. The protestors are demanding that, among other things, the school implement bullying and sexual assault prevention education for students and faculty immediately, hire a victims’ rights advocate, and generally do whatever it takes for survivors to “feel welcome and safe at all times on school grounds.” In short, for the girls’ right to an education to be restored.

(Header image credit)