37 Years Ago
Why would anyone wait for decades before reporting a crime? If a wrong so grievous as the violation of their bodies and sense of self-worth, wouldn’t it be human nature to immediately appeal to authorities and ensure that justice is done? Are they simply manipulating their own memories for the sake of … joining a movement? Gaining media attention? Sabotaging the career of someone they despise for partisan reasons?
Officer Joseph Saluto of the Exeter Police Department, responsible for investigating many of the sexual misconduct tips forwarded by PEA in 2016, graciously offered me some insight, after I pedaled to his office in the pouring Tuesday rain in search of quotes for a news article.“The most challenging thing about investigating sexual assault claims is people report about incidents that happened two or three decades ago,” he said. “Everyone says a different thing, you’re working with very little concrete evidence.”
It should not come as a surprise for us, given the cascade of reports, investigations and Boston Globe articles that had resulted in the arrest or barring from campus of former PEA members, how sexual assault allegations can concern events that took place in the distant past. Rick Schubart, the infamous former faculty member emeritus, and administrator, was forced to retire from the Academy and subsequently stripped of his titles, based on allegations of misconduct in the 1970s and 1980s. His victims might not have spoken up at all when the assault happened, or perhaps if they were quickly silenced. Only with the recent awareness about the prevalance of sexual assault did the public take heed.
Yet human memory is fallible. Any psychology student would say that we are completely able to—maybe even prone to—recall events not as they happened but as we want to interpret them so that multiple re-interpretations over a long period of time could replace the original memory with something quite different altogether. Whose memory, then, should we trust? And why the decades-long wait?
This was the question that President Donald Trump, and indeed many who deny the validity of Dr. Christine Ford’s claims, have reiterated. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local law enforcement authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!” the president tweeted last week in relation to the Brett Kavanaugh case. There were no charges filed, hence, no serious crime could have happened.
The logic of this statement is predicated upon the assumption that every victim of a serious crime or their “loving parents” would immediately seek retribution, that the outrage caused by violation would override the shame, the stigma associated with rape.
We are currently in the 2010s, four decades after a series of events that step by step, combusted into the social milieu that upturned many age-old standards of conduct in society. The sex revolution started off in the 60s, with icons such as Playboy, and was in full swing by the late 70s and early 80s, with explicit music and movies about drunk teenagers widely considered humorous. Note Playboy, not Playgirl (while the later actually did exist, its circulation quickly dwindled to next-to-nothing in a few years). Popular teenage dramas at the time, such as "Heathers, the Musical" and "Sixteen Candles," featured drugs and sex more violently than any of the TV-shows we watch in the current decade.
It is important to remember that much has changed how people view sexual activities and consent since then. Victims of assault, in the 80s, sometimes did not even label what happened to their bodies as assaults, blaming themselves and their decisions. The choice of going to that party and getting high, again, despite the obvious risks, was seen as a sacrifice in order to fit in and gain social capital. Because in higher educational institutions of the 80s, barely 10 years after the first females were admitted, male students still held a monopoly on power and social capital.
When considering the current case of Brett Kavanaugh—a matter that can neither be factually proven nor rebutted with certainty, the question of the accused’s guilt is almost irrelevant. What is most disturbing is the unfurling of institutions and cultures that for sure existed, and the power imbalances that time and time again have led to silence. They continue to do so now. President Trump, in another speech about his nominee, drew comparison between Dr. Ford’s allegation and those of Stormy Daniels, women who “got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me.”
Reactions like this only exacerbate the situation on both sides. Will young women and girls experiencing harassment right now have the courage to speak up, go to the FBI, upon hearing these messages from leaders of the country?
No big surprise if 37 years from now, allegations about assault in 2018 finally begin to surface.