According to RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), someone is sexually assaulted in the US every two minutes. 44% of sexual assault survivors are under 18, and 66% of survivors know their attacker. 1 out of 6 women and 1 out of 33 men has experienced attempted or successful sexual assault. Reed’s current student population is approximately 1,455. Doing the math yields a sobering local statistic: according to RAINN’s statistics, there are likely around 130 female-identifying and 20 male-identifying sexual assault survivors currently enrolled at Reed. This makes around 150 total survivors of sexual assault at Reed. That means that 10% of our population is at increased risk for serious psychological hardship from sexual assault alone. Unfortunately neither database includes trans*people although they are at a statistically higher risk for experiencing sexual assault than cis-people.
As such, this article aims to provide a response to Sal’s actions by explaining what trauma, re-traumatization, and triggering are and entail. I take my definitions from Nina Kammerer and Ruta Mazelis’ 2006 article, “After the Crisis: Trauma and Re-Traumatization.” The two begin with trauma itself, which they describe as
Interpersonal violence…which may or may not entail physical violence against a person but always entails violation of that person… Thus ‘trauma’ designates both events and their impact, in part because the actual experience of abuse and the assault that experience poses to sense of self, safety, belonging, and connection are intertwined.
It is incredibly important to emphasize that trauma does not only come from sexual assault. It does not only come from physical assault. Trauma can happen whenever a person is directly exposed to violent behavior or speech. Thus, the racist comments that Sal made on Saturday had just as much of a potential to be traumatizing as his comments about women and sexual assault. As such, all mention of trauma and triggering in this article includes racism in its purview despite the fact that such language has yet to be widely applied to the lived experience of those who have been subjected to racist aggression.
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Because managing power asymmetry has already injured so many people at Reed, the potential for retraumatization as a result of Sal’s performance was my primary concern. Kammerer & Mazelis note, “By attaching the meaning of ‘again’ only to trauma…erases the possible repeated nature and duration of…trauma and its impact… So, rather than as trauma once again, retraumatization should be understood as trauma yet again, with this ‘yet again’ likely to be again and again…” This ‘yet again’ is what Reed needs to shift its focus to—especially because, for many people who are attacked here, it isn’t for the first time.
Having had this lived experience myself, what I see as the fundamental flaw in discussion around Sal’s performance, free speech, and sexual assault at Reed is the extent to which the emerging narrative prioritizes students’ rights to say whatever they want, wherever they want, and neglects the right of all students to feel safe at this school. Campus climate is far from threatening of free speech—except for when it involves damaging community property, the administration is remarkably tolerant of student expression. Across the board, the student body is even more tolerant.
As such, allowing dialogue about Saturday’s performance to center on Sal’s right to speak freely turns him into a martyr of a crusade that doesn’t exist. Spinning this story in a direction that privileges Sal’s right to free speech (which isn’t being challenged) over the right of survivors to avoid being triggered and feel safe on campus (which has been transgressed) is unconscionable, especially as an honor case does not amount to censorship. The point of an honor case would not be to punish Sal—it would be to benefit those harmed by holding Sal accountable for the very real damage he caused on Saturday.
Again, the issue at hand is not and never has been that Sal’s bit wasn’t funny, or that people didn’t “like” it. Triggering has absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic judgment, and everything to do with uncontrollable, brutally manifest physiological pain. The word “trigger” comes from the language of clinical psychology around symptoms of PTSD, “the most widely known impact of trauma” (Kammerer & Mazelis). Thus, when people talk about “triggering” they are referring to the sudden incursion or exacerbation of any adverse symptoms associated with trauma, such as “Dissociation, flashbacks, and nightmares…[but also] depression, anxiety and panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychotic disorders” (Kammerer & Mazelis). In other words, triggering is often as detrimental to life as the trauma that grounds it—if not moreso. Incidents of violence are what create the psychological infrastructure that enables triggering, but a survivor is likely to experience many more episodes of triggering in their lifetime than they are of immediate violence. As such, on a day-to-day basis avoiding triggering actually becomes much more central to the quality of many survivor’s lives than avoiding directly abusive contact.
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It is in understanding all of this that consent and honor come into play. Like behaving honorably, practicing good consent is not about protocol. It’s not arbitrary. It is about avoiding treating someone in a way that could deeply impair their ability to thrive as a person. Frankly, it means giving a shit if or when you’ve hurt someone’s feelings.
Like behaving honorably, good consent can and must happen socially and sexually, and Reed’s criteria for defining both effective and ineffective consent are applicable to both. The audience’s resistance to Sal’s performance is an example of retaliation to actions taken without effective consent—“Silence does not equal consent, [for] a lack of verbal resistance does not, by itself, constitute consent. Resistance is not required, [for] a lack of physical resistance does not, by itself, constitute consent” (Reed College 2012b). During Sal’s performance, sincere demonstrations of both verbal resistance and physical resistance were present. Because these reactions were elicited as a genuine response to unwanted and spontaneous violence, both the audience’s reaction and Sal’s behavior can be read under the rubric of assault.
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From my experience at Reed, it seems that many students worry that being asked to avoid triggering behavior will limit their right to speak freely because they don’t understand what is triggering and what isn’t. Unfortunately, there is no universal metric. This why, rather than focusing on censoring potentially offensive student speech, we need to encourage folks not to behave aggressively or callously, and come to a sanctioned agreement that enables students to call out triggering or hurtful behavior when it does arise in a protected, supported, and respected way. Making discourse accessible to everyone at Reed ultimately means maintaining a certain level of awareness about where and who we are.
We are here because we have so much potential—to be brilliant, constructive, lovely, and whole. Attacking one another as Sal did on Saturday seriously undermines our ability to be all of these things, both as individuals and as a community. As painful as it is, experiences like this one are what access our potential—both positively and negatively—and force our community to grow in necessary ways. The tragedy of this situation is that growth should never be involuntary, as someone will always be harmed by the violence inherent in impulsion. In this case, the person harmed is not Sal—it’s the many people he hurt with his speech. We owe those people accountability, and we owe them transformation. Influencing what Sal thinks is not my aim—but improving the standards of what our community will tolerate is. I will never advocate against free speech, but I will advocate changing the debate towards something that is much more in jeopardy: the right of all students to exist happily, safely, and equitably at Reed.
Sources
Feministing.com
2011 Critic’s Pick: Definitions of Sexual Assault. Feministing.com. Accessed
11/21/12,
Kammerer, Nina & Ruta Mazelis
2006 Resource Paper: Trauma and Retraumatization. SAMHSA’s GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation. Presented at the After the Crisis: Healing from Trauma after Disasters Expert Panel Meeting in Bethesda, MD. Accessed 11/21/12,
RAINN
2012 Statistics. The Rape, Assault, and Incest National Network. Accessed
11/21/12,
Reed College
2012a Facts about Reed. Reed Website. Accessed 11/21/12,
2012b Sexual Assault Prevention and Response at Reed. Accessed 11/21/12,
