Bring back sexual assault hotline

Candlelight vigils in Tappan Square. Chalked up sidewalks with “Take Back the Night.” Somber stationery sent from the President’s office. With perverse regularity, about once a semester, the campus is confronted with the eye-opening news of an alleged sexual assault.

While the natural progression from astonishment to anger to acceptance afflicts the deepest wounds in the victim, it affects everyone on campus.

Sexual assault is the worst form of crime perpetrated at Oberlin College on a yearly basis.

This campus needs an open and confidential hotline to immediately aid and counsel sexual assault victims. It is a crucial first stage to help victims and provides an important avenue in which to report and document these crimes. Without a hotline, the community risks forcing the burden of the crime solely on the victim and allowing perpetrators to remain unpunished for carrying out the cruelest form of degradation onto fellow students.

Until last semester, this campus had a sexual assault hotline—however flawed in the eyes of its naysayers—and trained counselors on call to help victims navigate the immeasurable trauma and vulnerability of a sexual assault.

But the increasingly secretive Sexual Assault Support Team, which ran the hotline, imploded last spring, foreshadowing the hotline’s official demise in May. However, the hotline had been ineffectual since February, when counselors stopped answering the phone.

Why did the service cease to exist? Because SAST was in the midst of an internal tug-of-war between many longtime members, including trained counselors, and a new firebrand faction that condemned the group’s own hotline as “racist.”

The logic of the rebellious group, which eventually claimed the leadership of SAST, was that the hotline was inaccessible to any victims who were not heterosexual, white women. While, to be fair, statistics could never gauge the racial character of something so personal as sexual assault counseling, the new leadership has not sought to justify in concrete terms dismantling this crucial campus service.

Not interested in the obvious argument that disconnecting the service meant absolutely no counseling for anyone, the group proceeded to dismantle SAST’s primary chartered purpose: the hotline. It could take a year or more to train new counselors for the hotline, organizers said in May. According to junior Farah Joyner, “SAST must rebuild itself before it can make long-term plans.”

SAST is not running an ExCo this semester to train new counselors. However, Joyner is teaching an ExCo “for heterosexual, queer and trans female-bodied people of color to examine issues of sexual and relationship violence,” titled “People of Color: Violence and Sexual Health.” This is an admirable and praiseworthy ExCo, but does it adequately replace SAST counselor training?

“If you can’t see a reflection of yourself within the organization, it’s safe to assume that the service providers don’t have your interests in mind,” said SAST member senior Julie Dulani last spring to the Review. “It becomes very hard to trust the service.”

But ever since the process of reinventing SAST started, very little has been seen or heard from the group. They have few or no trained counselors and the leadership refuses categorically to speak to the Review about their plans.

This is what is most disturbing: the group that shut down one of the campus’ most important and worthwhile services refuses to be transparent about their intentions and the services that they may or may not provide. Were the hotline to restart tomorrow, very few people, we suspect, would feel comfortable using it, because the organization has not clearly stated its reformed goals or its commitment to the entire community.

Because the organization is not willing to provide a clear course of action or seek community input during the process, it has ceased to be a service organization and has taken on the self-appointed task of being a martyr for the problems surrounding sexual race relations on campus.

SAST needs to announce publicly its course of action. It needs to understand that the group serves a crucial purpose on campus that cannot be adequately carried out while the hotline is shut down. Slamming the door on the sexual assault hotline has the expected potential to cause immeasurable harm.

Above all, SAST needs to stop appearing defensive and propose its actions and goals openly to the community at large. Undoubtedly, more than a few people would listen.

–Editor-in-Chief, Douglass Dowty
–Managing Editor, Faith Richards
–Commentary Editor, Casey Ashenhurst
 
 

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