Oxy Voices of Rape—and Protest

Rape can be one of the most traumatic experiences in anyone’s life, especially a young woman’s. Often, the worst part comes after a victim reports the crime—and receives little or no support, empathy and compassion from figures of authority.

According to six young women (three of them are recent Oxy graduates), that was precisely what happened when they told college administrators about being allegedly raped by fellow male students.

At a Thursday news conference, the young women spoke before a roomful of TV cameras about how the college’s “sexual assault reporting process" is "extremely alienating and victim-blaming,” in the words of Carly Mee, a student who was allegedly raped the weekend after her first week of classes as a freshman.

“When I told an administrator that I did not feel safe, I was told that I had nothing to worry about, that she had met with my rapist, and that he didn’t seem like the type of person who would something like that,” Mee said.

Reporting a rape would be a “long and grueling process” that would “take a toll on my mental health” and would “lose me a lot of friends,” was the advice that Oxy graduate Kenda Woolfson allegedly received from one college dean.

“I have faced a long and miserable process trying to bring my rapist to a hearing that they are still dragging out,” said a first-year student who wishes to remain anonymous, referring to college administrators and to her alleged rape two months ago. “Occidental has created a culture where victims are afraid to come forward and where the perpetrators know they can get away with it.”

The student accused college President Jonathan Veitch of "attacking and shaming me for speaking up" prior to a protest by hundreds of students and faculty over "Occidental's failure to issue a campuswide alert" following incidents of alleged rape.

For its part, the college administration has maintained that “the creation of a safe and respectful campus environment at Oxy is paramount,” as Oxy’s Director of Communications Jim Tranquada put it on Thursday, hours after a federal complaint against the college was filed by two Oxy professors working with a total of 36 victims of alleged campus rape or sexual assault.

• Click here to read details about Thursday's news conference.

• Click here to read a series of recent open letters from Oxy President Veitch to the campus community regarding the sexual assaults scandal.

• And click here to read first-person "Survivor Stories" of rape posted by Oxy students on Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition, a website that is helping revolutionize campus anti-rape activism across the nation.