THE ONLY WAY FORWARD IS TO LISTEN TO SURVIVORS
Content includes discussion of sexual violence
By now, many of us have likely read about Jane Doe’s experience of sexual violence at Cornell University and the lack of accountability that followed.
Jane Doe’s experience of violence is horrific. She deserves justice. She deserves privacy to navigate her own experience and to tell her story on her own terms. She deserves the resources, support, and protection that she should have had from the very beginning. She deserves for this not to have happened to her.
Sexual violence is perhaps the most intimate form of harm a person can experience. It is a devastating experience to have your bodily autonomy violated in such a significant way. And though it does not define who a person is, and healing is not out of reach, it is a life-changing experience, nonetheless.
High visibility cases such as this reverberate across communities. For some, it is hard to fathom such violence. For many, they see their own experiences reflected. For all, we are left asking, “How did this happen?”
The outrage at what happened is both inspiring and a reckoning. The grief is heavy and felt deeply across communities. But often, in moments like this, we lose the survivor’s voice that brought this violence to the forefront in the first place. Often, we let our outrage become the story, and the experience of the survivor gets lost in the noise.
So how do we hold our grief, our anger at the violence itself, while honoring and centering the totality of Jane Doe’s experience? How can we honor the experience that galvanized the country, while also respecting the multitude of truths of what it is to be a survivor, and what it is to have justice?
It begins by listening to and centering those who have experienced the harm. We must ask, “What does justice mean to you? What would make you safer?”
Survivors are not a monolith. What justice, safety, and healing look like to one person is not the same as what it looks like to another. Some survivors may want punishment; some may want accountability or repair. Some survivors may want to tell their story or report. Some survivors may want something entirely different than all of these things, and some may want none of them at all. It is not for us to tell a survivor they are right or wrong for how they choose to move forward. All we must do is listen to, support, and honor what they need.
Jane Doe deserves to define her own sense of healing and justice, as all survivors do. The way forward is not to push all survivors into a single idea of what that looks like. Rather, it is to build and create pathways and systems that honor and center what that person needs, what they want, and what their vision of justice looks like. It is to change the conditions in our world that allow harm to happen, not just respond to it after it does. It is to believe survivors.
To survivors in our community: you are not alone, it was not your fault, and we believe you.
Anyone who is experiencing or has experienced sexual violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, or human trafficking can reach out to the Advocates of Routt County 24/7 confidential SafeLine at 970-879-8888.
You can reach out to the SafeLine no matter how long ago an experience of harm happened, if you are unsure how to label what you experienced or if you have not put a name to what happened, if you are choosing or forced to stay in a relationship, or if you are a community member looking to support a friend or loved one through an experience of harm.
Signed,
Julia Lowenthal, Program Director of COMMA Projects
Allison Doglio, Program Director of Advocates of Routt County