Women Wage National Campaign against Sexual Assault Level 1 Jane Stancill Jane Stancill is a journalist and feminist advocator. She specializes in individual rights and gender equality. This article was originally published for the Raleigh Times in Raleigh, North Carolina, on June 1, 2013. In Chapel Hill, a college student gets a tattoo, a small “IX” Roman numeral on her ankle. 1 On the West Coast, another “IX” is inked on another woman’s ankle. The tattoos signify two women - compatriots and friends - coming together and overcoming 2 other scars that are invisible: Both have told of being raped while students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Annie Clark and Andrea Pino got their ink badges on the same day in January, when they, 3 along with three other women, filed a federal complaint against the university. They allege that the university mishandled sexual assault cases and violated students’ rights to equal education under the Title IX gender discrimination law. They also filed a complaint charging UNC with underreporting sexual assaults under a campus crime reporting law. Both complaints are now under investigation by the federal government. Neither Clark nor Pino knew the other would get a tattoo that day. Both wanted to mark the 4 milestone - taking a stand for sexual assault victims, against a university they loved. Clark, a 2011 UNC graduate from Raleigh, and Pino, a rising senior from Miami, have 5 already begun to change attitudes at the campus, where a task force is rewriting the school’s sexual assault policy. The university also hired new staff and a sexual misconduct consultant who has facilitated a monthslong campus conversation about the issue. In the months since they got their tattoos, the 20-something women have become leaders in 6 a national movement against a campus culture they say perpetuates sexual violence by keeping it under wraps and letting perpetrators off the hook. The women formed what they call the Title IX Network, a coalition of students across the 7 nation who are demanding that their colleges alter the way they deal with sexual violence. They have become informal consultants to sexual assault survivors elsewhere who have taken action against their own campuses. Last month at a news conference in New York, Clark and Pino, in Tar Heel T-shirts, joined 8 students announcing their federal complaints against Dartmouth College, Swarthmore College, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Southern California. “The goal is just to present a united front against not only sexual assault,” Clark said in an 9 interview, “but also the way universities across the country are handling and/or not handling it, how they’re covering it up when it does happen and how it’s been happening for years and years.” Clark, now an administrator at the University of Oregon, worked with Occidental College in 10 California, which also is under a federal investigation. Pino recently flew to Dartmouth to brainstorm with students there. The women have Facebook page representing students from more than 50 colleges who 11 want change. Along with others, they have raised $11,000 for a “Know Your IX” campaign to educate college students, starting this fall, on their rights under federal law. The pair was featured in a New York Times story and received other national coverage. 12 They have written for Huffington Post and other blogs. Their cause has even entered the cultural Zeitgeist: an April episode of the TV drama “Law and Order: SVU” centered on rape at a college fraternity house. The show was peppered with bits of dialogue, description and experiences ripped from the women’s stories. Clark doesn’t talk much about her attack, which she said happened off campus when she 13 was a first-year student in 2007. But she does describe what happened when she reported it to a female administrator who no longer works at UNC and whom she won’t identify. It has become a rallying cry in the movement and was quoted almost verbatim in the “Law and Order” episode by a character with the last name of Clark. “Rape is like football,” Clark said the administrator told her, “and if you look back on the 14 game, Annie, what would you do differently in that situation?” Repeating the story at the New York news conference, Clark said: “I was being blamed for 15 a violent crime committed against me. Rape is the only crime in society where we blame the victim instead of the perpetrator.” For Pino, publicly describing her rape, which she said happened at a party near campus in 16 the spring of 2012, has been difficult. But she has not held back the details - her head slammed against a wall, her vision blurred from blood in her contact lenses, his fingernails digging into her scalp, the black Levis he wore. “I remembered his eyes; I felt my throat close up; I felt his lips on my neck; I felt his teeth 17 on my skin; I realized what many fear most: I was raped,” Pino recounted. She ran home, bloody, and didn’t know what to do. Later, she reported it anonymously, 18 slipping a piece of paper into a box on campus. The boxes for blind reports had been Clark’s idea when she was a student at UNC. Pino didn’t tell the police and didn’t pursue a formal process, fearing that she wouldn’t be 19 believed. She began to struggle academically because of anxiety. An adviser wasn’t sympathetic, she said, and suggested that she was lazy about her schoolwork. Pino would later contact Clark, who had graduated a year earlier. The anonymous box was a 20 good thing, she told her, but the policy wasn’t working. The two started to draft a Title IX complaint that they would eventually submit to the 21 federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. They listened to Supreme Court cases on their iPhones; they read thousands of pages of legal research. Two other victims from UNC joined them. Months later, a former UNC assistant dean of students, Melinda Manning, would sign on to the complaint. Clark and Pino reached out to students who made waves at Yale University and Amherst 22 College. They realized that this was more than a UNC problem, and it had to be presented that way. “Instead of saying, ’UNC is a bad place with bad administrators,’ we said, ’It’s not just 23 UNC; this is happening everywhere,’ ” Clark said. Protests were launched, bringing unwanted attention and embarrassment to a campus that 24 had already been through athletic and academic fraud scandals. UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp wrote a letter to students, faculty and staff 25 members saying, “We have a problem on our campus and we need to talk about it.” The university’s top attorney strongly denied underreporting sexual assaults in campus 26 crime statistics. Thorp also defended the university, saying it had revamped policies to conform to 2011 federal guidance on sexual assault. Federal law requires campuses to have a process for adjudicating student-on-student 27 complaints, regardless of whether a victim takes a sexual assault report to police. For years at UNC, that process was conducted in a student-run honor court that some 28 victims said was unfair. Now, though, hearings are conducted by a judicial board made up of two students, two faculty members and one staff member. The new policy provides both a formal and informal process for handling complaints. Critics have argued that the new policy was written without input from students, faculty 29 members and others with expertise in sexual assault. They say there hasn’t been adequate training for judicial board members, and they complain that the policy is overly legalistic and difficult to understand. Once the five women filed the federal complaint, though, the university opted for a more 30 inclusive process by creating a sexual assault policy task force with broad campus representation. That group will work through the summer to rewrite the policy. After the complaint was filed, the women were almost immediately in the media spotlight - 31 on blogs, in newspapers, on TV. They invited the attention, sometimes tweeting national reporters with information. One of the complainants, Landen Gambill, faced an honor court charge that accused her of 32 intimidating a fellow student - by publicly alleging she had been sexually assaulted by a former boyfriend, whom she did not identify by name. That stoked outrage, and Gambill, then a sophomore from Mooresville, filed a retaliation complaint against the university. There was also retaliation for Pino and Clark. Pino’s dorm was vandalized; photos of the 33 damage showed obscene, spray-painted images on Pino’s bulletin board. Someone tweeted to Clark: “Karma will realign and punish all of you monsters for your crimes against humanity. Death to your cult of victimhood.” But more often, the women received expressions of solidarity. Others from across the nation 34 wanted to know how to get involved. “That’s when people started to reach out and say, me too, me too, me too,” Clark said. 35 Sofie Karasek, a second-year student from the University of California, Berkeley, and three 36 other women had filed a report of sexual assault against the same assailant, she said. He was allowed to graduate in December through an early resolution process, and Karasek said she felt no confidence in the school’s disciplinary process. “I saw Annie and Andrea on the cover of The New York Times, and I just thought, ’Wow, 37 we have to get in on this movement because we are feeling exactly the same problems here at Berkeley,’ and we felt as though (the university) just wanted us to forget about it and ignore it,” said Karasek, a complainant in the federal filing.