Content Warning/Editors’ Note: This article contains references to sexual assault. It is published anonymously given concerns for the author’s safety in accordance with The Phoenix’s anonymity policy.
Swarthmore College is not only rife with sexual violence, but its students also punish survivors who speak out. The detailed accounts of sexual assaults committed by members of Swarthmore’s fraternities made national news in 2019. Although Swarthmore’s fraternities disbanded, the school continues to cultivate a documented rape culture. The reflexive response among the student body is to blame Title IX, President Val Smith, or unspecified inadequacies of the college’s administration. While the college does fail to maintain a safe environment, this does not absolve students of blame.
During my time at Swarthmore, staff and policies changed, but campus rape culture stayed the same. Students need to examine their role in maintaining it. The harm imposed by sexual violence is devastating, but the social isolation that follows is often as bad, if not worse. This additional trauma a victim experiences from the subsequent negative reactions to an assault is called secondary victimization. Few people are rapists, countless people ostracize survivors.
Harming survivors can be a passive act. How many times have you withdrawn from someone because you heard a thirdhand rumor about her? You don’t outright condemn her, but she seems complicated now, and it’s easier to mind your own business. Or you do feel bad for her, but when she says the words “rape,” “sexual assault,” or “sexual harassment,” you excuse yourself from the conversation. Maybe she’s not asking you to fix it per se, but you have a midterm coming up (your third in this class!), and is Kohlberg really the place to talk about this anyway?
The Swarthmore community has endless excuses for its isolationist behavior. The rise in “therapy speak” enables the use of “boundaries” to “protect one’s peace,” typically from outspoken survivors. Additionally, discussion of sexual violence becomes “drama,” at which point discussing it becomes “gossip.” When Swarthmore students reduce sexual violence to petty bickering, they paint survivors as vindictive, ultimately furthering their ostracization.
Swarthmore is a small campus — one where survivors cannot avoid their assailant. Just as inescapable is the gossip, which inevitably warps accounts of sexual violence. One all-too-common distortion: classmates, under the guise of well-meaning intellectualism, attempt to add “nuance” or a “balanced perspective.” Pushing back on this false neutrality draws accusations of hysteria, and attempting to clarify details brands one as a gossip and vindictive. As a result, survivors receive no less stigma than their assailants.
This stigmatization has a price. Survivors grow isolated as their friends find excuses to distance themselves, saying that they “don’t do drama” or are “afraid to be accused next.” It is one thing to avoid a single assailant; it is another to avoid an ever-growing web of skeptics. Survivors of sexual violence are at an increased risk of experiencing it again. One mechanism for this is that survivors facing isolation cannot afford to be discerning about who they let into their lives. This attracts opportunists, and when the survivors are revictimized, their peers are even less likely to believe them. This cycle can only be broken via bystanders willing to believe survivors.
As an alumnus, Swarthmore isn’t my life anymore, but I am still working through complex post-traumatic stress disorder from the secondary victimization I endured after multiple sexual assaults. Many of my former classmates are, too. While I managed to graduate, I know many others who quietly took leave of absences, transferred schools, or were involuntarily hospitalized. Social isolation is mean even in the best of circumstances and especially cruel in a small environment such as ours. Think about all the “bad women” you’ve heard of at Swarthmore, and ask yourself whether they truly deserve that epithet. Give the “shit-stirrers” a chance. Clarify rumors. Investigate the gossip at the source, not proxies. Let yourself be uncomfortable instead of dismissing “difficult women.” Don’t pretend that avoidance is neutral. Otherwise, you are part of the fumes that choke every new canary who tries to speak out.
