Letter to the Editor: Heather Nelson, Claire Dauge-Roth

To the Editor,

We would like to share this letter, a draft of which we sent to Principal Lisa MacFarlane. After she sent us an email response, we met to discuss these issues and hope to continue this dialogue. We hope that this letter, along with the PIRC article, will demonstrate the importance of these issues on our campus and highlight some very real experiences. This letter does not refer to us specifically in the examples provided, but rather it voices girls’ trauma, and attempts to show how hard it is to talk about these topics. We hope this letter raises awareness about the realities of assault and helps foster constructive discussion and change on campus.

Dear Dr. MacFarlane,

I am writing to you because I am a woman and you are a woman and so maybe you can understand where I am coming from. I am a girl and I’m done talking about my life and experiences and fears in the way that people want me to. I’m done listening to, “That’s the problem with activists, they don’t say it the way they should to reach people.” It’s time to hear it as it is. Listen to me, a woman. Just listen.

I can’t ride a bus without looking for that guy who might look at me in the wrong ways. I can’t go to a party with my friends without looking around to make sure I can feel safe—even then, I know that the guy smiling at me pouring me a drink can, in a second, let a white pill slip from his fingers and it would be over for me. I can’t go to class at my elite boarding school without middle aged men whistling from their cars or shouting out, “Hey honey, what are ya doin’ tonight?” I can’t trust anyone because no one, not even that guy who I thought was my friend, has been told they can’t rape me.

I am a girl and that is an incredible threat to my life. I am sick and tired of planning around my gender for safety. But the truth is I’m not safe anyway, not even if I play by all those victim-blaming rules: Don’t wear a skirt that’s too short, don’t drink, don’t lead him on, don’t be such a slut. Yet girls are raped regardless of the circumstances. In the United States, reported rapes alone happen every 6.2 minutes. Taking into consideration all the rapes and assaults that go unreported, there is a girl being assaulted every minute. One in five women are raped in their lifetime. Considering half of the 1,086 students currently attending the Academy as women, then according to this average 109 women who are attending Exeter right now will be raped in their lifetime. That is not okay and we, as a community, need to stop letting it be okay.

Rape happens on this campus—this is not a foreign issue. The gruesome truth is that I am still a teenager and I know too many girls who have been raped. I have held too many girls when they’re crying late at night because he Snapchatted them, disrespecting everything about them and the trauma he caused. I am scared because there is something to be scared of.

I shouldn’t have to be scared. It wasn’t a prerequisite at birth, just as being a misogynist, a sexist, a rapist, was not how my male classmates were born either. It was something we were taught, through jokes, through media, through our elders. No boy was born and naturally looked at his mother and other women with disrespect. No newborn girl looked at her older brother with his big eyes and wondrous smile and feared his best friend would rape her when she was sixteen because she was there and because he could. This is taught and it needs desperately to be unlearned.

I hope you take my words seriously because I am so tired and as a woman I hope (as much as I don’t) that girls and you, Dr. MacFarlane, can understand my pain and experience. I shouldn’t be thinking that I would be safer going to an all girls’ college. I shouldn’t have my first instinct be to run when a pickup pulls up to me at night asking for directions. I shouldn’t have so much experience consoling my friends who have been through such trauma. I shouldn’t have to anticipate that my male friends could easily rape me too. This is a problem on campuses and we, women, haven’t even hit the worst of it. Yet we’ve already been broken in. It’s about time I felt safe somewhere because each day is hard and long and I’m exhausted. And it’s time everyone listened.

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