Chapter 1. The Story of After
DarbiAnne Goodwin had always loved Pennridge School District. She had been an enthusiastic student since she’d enrolled as a preschooler in the rural Pennsylvania district, which her older siblings attended, too. At the end of her freshman year of high school, she had a near-perfect GPA and a résumé full of extracurricular commitments. She hoped to be president of the student council someday.
Over winter break her sophomore year, a classmate sexually assaulted Darbi in the parking lot of a local restaurant, the Country Place. The young man, “H.,” was a year ahead of Darbi at Pennridge High School. When Darbi returned to school in January, she saw H. and his friends everywhere. A classmate told her that these students had started a rumor that, on the night of the assault, Darbi had consented to sex with multiple boys. She could no longer stand to step foot in the school she had once loved.
Darbi needed help. She told her mother about the assault, and together they approached Pennridge administrators. More than anything, Darbi just wanted H. and his friends to leave her alone. She did not want to worry about seeing them between classes or in the lunchroom. She didn’t want to hear the rumors they spread about her. She wanted to feel safe enough to focus on school again.
There was a lot Pennridge could have done after receiving Darbi’s report. Administrators could have arranged Darbi’s and H.’s schedules so that they didn’t have to see each other all the time. They could have offered Darbi free counseling services and a tutor to help her catch up on any work she missed because of her anxiety. They could have investigated the allegation by interviewing Darbi, H., and anyone the two students had told about that night. (Those conversations may have easily resolved the matter: H. later admitted to the basic facts of the assault.) If the school determined that the evidence proved Darbi’s claim, they could have suspended H. Even more importantly, Pennridge could have connected him with rehabilitative services to change the way he treated women and ensure Darbi would be his last victim. They could have assembled the whole school to learn about sexual respect.
Pennridge pursued none of these options. Instead, administrators told Darbi and her mom that the sexual assault was a police matter, not a concern for the school. It even put H. in the same study hall as Darbi and assigned her to the same lunch period as his friends, who continued to harass her. As a result, Darbi ended up missing months of high school. “If I got up the courage to go to school, by third period, I would just leave,” she told a journalist. “I would break down and cry and go home. I probably spent one to two full days at school a week, and most of my days were spent either in a bathroom stall, covering my mouth and trying not to let people hear that I was crying, or in the guidance counselor’s office, crying. . . . Every day was the same routine.”
Darbi’s GPA plummeted. She avoided the cafeteria, where she knew she’d see her harassers. She finished her sophomore year at home, trying to teach herself the material she should have learned in class, and then ultimately completed her junior year through an online school that didn’t offer the advanced courses she should have taken. She was nominated for student council president but had to turn it down: she didn’t feel safe enough to attend meetings at school.
I met Darbi when she called the National Women’s Law Center for legal assistance. She was one of my first clients as a young attorney, and my colleagues and I represented her and two other young women in lawsuits against Pennridge. (The case settled before trial.) Pennridge was right, of course, that sexual assault is a crime. But it is also a threat to the victims’ educations and opportunities—a threat that exacerbates and entrenches systemic inequalities.
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SURVIVORS DO NOT feel or experience or mourn or suffer or heal as a group. They live as individuals, and their experiences of harm differ from one another. Violence marks us all in different ways, to different degrees.
Despite this variety of reactions, victims often speak in similar ways about how harassment stops them from living full lives, especially if they don’t receive the support they need to feel safe. Unaddressed harassment forces them to withdraw from communities and opportunities they most value, and fundamentally shifts the way they move through the world. This harm is one that most women and gender-nonconforming people can understand. Anyone who has ever been catcalled or followed home from work knows how a stranger can make you feel like the streets do not equally belong to you. In the same way, survivors learn that their schools, their workplaces, and their communities are not theirs, either. This has material impacts on survivors’ educations, careers, economic security, and even their freedom.
In Darbi’s case, because she no longer felt safe at school, she had to finish her classes at home. That experience is all too common. While the problem is under-researched, data shows that over a third of college sexual assault survivors quit school. If they stay, they are less likely to participate in class discussion, and are more likely to avoid parts of the campus, skip class sessions, or drop a course. Their academic performance suffers. One study found that women who were raped in their first semester of college finished their freshman year with lower GPAs than those who were not; they were about 2.5 times more likely to end their first year with a GPA under 2.5. “These deflated GPAs have a rippling negative impact on survivor’s graduate school options and access to professional opportunities,” notes Cari Simon, a Title IX lawyer. “Those lost opportunities are devastating. . . . Individual students miss out on what they had worked hard to achieve.” Sexual harassment in school, then, can depress a survivor’s wages over their lifetime. Some victims lose scholarships when their GPAs decline, or end up saddled with student debt from degrees they were never able to complete.
A similar pattern can be seen among workers. According to a 2017 study, women who were sexually harassed at work were 6.5 times as likely to leave their job as their unharmed colleagues. Those victims often leave for a worse job with lower pay. And those who stay may be financially penalized as they struggle with the abuse and its aftermath. “Many women who experience sexual harassment at work report increased anxiety and depression, which is associated with lower productivity and poorer performance at work,” explains a report by the National Partnership for Women and Families. Plus, “women in workplaces that do not address sexual harassment may feel less empowered to negotiate salaries and raises, depressing their long-term earnings and advancement.”
Women are not the only ones to experience such effects. A man recently wrote to the New York Times about an incident that had occurred many years before. “I was on the receiving end of an unwelcome sexual advance,” he wrote, “when an older man with whom I worked invited me to his apartment for lunch. I agreed, innocently enough, but when I saw that he had prepared a meal only for me, I quickly realized that I was to be his lunch. As his advances became more and more aggressive, I froze—couldn’t move, couldn’t speak— until he unzipped my fly, took my penis in his hand, and pulled it into his mouth. The shock of that sensation in that situation stimulated a fight-or-flight response, and I bolted for the door. I quit my job that afternoon so that I would never again encounter that man.”
Beyond threatening their success at school and work, sexual harms put survivors’ very liberty at stake. A startling number of women in prison are victims of sexual violence. A 2012 report commissioned by the Department of Justice concluded that 86 percent of women in jail had been sexually assaulted at least once in their lives; 77 percent had been abused by a partner. These trends start early. A 2006 study of girls involved in Oregon’s juvenile justice system found that more than three in four had been sexually abused before they turned thirteen. (The rates among boys are not as high, but far too many boys in the juvenile justice system also have histories of sexual trauma.) No wonder advocates speak of a “sexual abuse to prison pipeline.” The chain of causation between sexual assault and incarceration may not be as clear as the case of a worker who gets fired the day after turning down her boss’s advances, but it is just as undeniable. Studies show that trauma—when unaddressed by proper support and treatment—can lead girls and women to drug and alcohol abuse, mental health struggles, and violent behavior. Young survivors may skip school to avoid their harassers, and then end up in trouble with the law for truancy or crimes of poverty.
Once inside a prison, survivors face a harrowing likelihood of further abuse. And when they leave, they must try to rebuild relationships, find an employer willing to hire a worker with a record, and secure housing, which may exclude people convicted of certain crimes. All the while they must grapple with the compounding traumas of abuse and incarceration. Those forms of instability—social isolation, poverty, homelessness, mental illness—in turn make them vulnerable to further violence.
The devastating effects of harassment on its individual victims thus combine to reinforce and exacerbate existing societal inequalities. The groups most vulnerable to harassment are those who already face marginalization. Women are sexually assaulted far more often than men are. Queer people and people who are transgender or non-binary (that is, those who do not identify as a man or a woman) are more likely to be sexually assaulted than their heterosexual or cisgender counterparts. People with disabilities are also subject to unusually high rates of sexual abuse. Native American women are assaulted at astronomical rates, double that of all other racial and ethnic groups. The population of women in prison, who are likely to suffer sexual abuse both before and during incarceration, is disproportionately made up of women of color. And between 2012 and 2016, Black women filed harassment complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) at nearly three times the rate as did white, non-Hispanic women.
Harassment compounds the obstacles that members of these marginalized groups already struggle to overcome. It systematically deprives them of educational opportunities—either because they feel unsafe at school, like Darbi, or because they become entrapped in the criminal legal system at a young age. The scars of discrimination accumulate and limit their entry points to the working world, itself still rife with harassment. In their jobs, workers from marginalized groups are denied by harassment the opportunities to build wealth and to climb up the ranks that their white, straight, cisgender male peers enjoy. That, in turn, means fewer women, queer people, trans people, and people of color in leadership positions, where they might shape policy and, if needed, support younger workers who face harassment themselves. The effect is generational. If Darbi’s career is stunted by her deflated high school grades, who will pay for her daughters’ educations? What lessons about who this world is for, and how they can expect to move through it, will they inherit? Over and over again, in all these different contexts, abuse operates in the same ways: it targets the vulnerable and keeps them vulnerable. Inequality ensures its own survival through violence.
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WE RARELY HEAR these stories about survivors’ lives after abuse. We read about the lurid details of back-alley rapes and “casting couch” coercion. But to the extent we think about the future, we focus entirely on the accused, debating whether their downfalls were deserved and what the terms of their redemption might be. Missing entirely are the years the victim lost following the harm, the costs large and small, what never came to be. Because the story stops when the assault is done, those lasting ramifications rarely factor into our understanding of the harm wrought by sexual harassment. I think often about an administrator at the prestigious Deerfield Academy who, according to a lawsuit filed against the school, told a young woman that the decision not to punish the boy who sexually assaulted her was based on “the very difficult choice” between “a boy’s future and her feelings.” As though only her feelings were at stake, and her own prospects—surely shaped by her assailant’s continued presence in her small rural school—were of no consequence. As though only men get futures.
The erasure of victims is no accident. It is a direct result of the impact sexual harassment has had on so many, derailing their educations, careers, and rise to community leadership. When victims are excluded from public life, our world is shaped in their absence, by their absence. Legislative staffers tell of dropping out of politics because of rampant harassment in Washington and state houses. What laws were never passed because these survivors were not in the room? What could have been if they had kept their seats at the table? The actors blackballed by Weinstein, the comedians intimidated by Louis C.K., the women who left media after working for Charlie Rose—all these survivors lost the opportunity to tell their stories, to influence public consciousness. The result is that, in ways we will never appreciate, we have seen the world through Weinstein’s lens but never theirs.
One might fairly ask: Why should we care about missing stories when the stakes are survival? But part of what violence does is rob us of the opportunity to do more than survive. To describe the world as we see it and build one where this does not happen again. To write our collective future.
That is the story not only of harassment but of inequality and injustice writ large. Some years back, the writer Reina Gattuso, then a student, wrote about wandering around her college library. Sometimes, she wrote, walking through the stacks, “I feel the incredible pressure of the books that are not there”:
There is a ghost [library] full of books that did not get written. There is a book I did not write when I put all my energy into not-eating, and there is a book I did not write when I felt weird because I was in love with a girl. There is a book I didn’t write when I was dodging sexual comments, and there is a book I didn’t write when I was feeling inadequate for not receiving sexual comments. There is a book I didn’t write when I was sick with what I thought was love.
There are books that you didn’t write, either.
There are books you didn’t write because you were waiting for someone to make a racist comment, and there were books you didn’t write because someone made a racist comment. There were books you didn’t write because you were trying to figure out if it was really a racist comment and everyone said you were being too sensitive, and you wondered if maybe you were.
There were books you didn’t write because you are sensitive, because of course you are sensitive, because the half-slights and the full slights wear you down and all the books in you start rioting and say: Hey! I am a book! Let me out, let me out of here!
SEXUAL JUSTICE. Copyright © 2021 by Alexandra Brodsky.
