Magazine Shines Light on Secret Sphere

As candles dimly lit their faces, students tried to illuminate a normally obscure area of campus discourse.

Though they told stories of sexual assault, they were not the victims. The authors of these sometimes graphic accounts had chosen to remain anonymous, even at the launch of a magazine created to broadcast such stories.

The anonymity that the undergraduates wanted to preserve emblematized the ambiguity of vocalizing experiences seen as stigmatizing.

The launch of “Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at Harvard” drew 75 students to Kirkland’s Junior Common Room last night. Undegraduates munched on cheese and crackers as members of the Spoken Word Society performed accounts published in the magazine, which features poems, first-hand accounts, and other documents which fall outside the normal boundaries of genre.

With the first issue of what is hoped to be a yearly publication, the magazine staff aim to personalize normally clinical accounts of sexual assault.

“Students need to read this magazine and be moved,” said the magazine’s editor, Neagheen Homaifar ’10. “There’s no way you can read this and not feel something.”

‘A VOYEURISTIC TOPIC’

Though reported campus incidences of sexual assault appear in small numbers, conversation about such cases isn’t exactly hush-hush.

According to a 2003 report by a committee of Harvard professors, deans, a senior tutor, and a student, “forcible sexual offenses” numbered 11 in 1999, 16 in 2000, 23 in 2001, and 16 in 2002.

The Committee to Address Sexual Assault at Harvard estimated 5 to 16 percent of all incidents were actually reported.

Homaifar said the number of incidences was not represented by what she saw as silence on campus.

“Sexual assault happens way too frequently,” she said, “and there’s not that parallel response or dialogue.”

But silence wasn’t exactly the case last fall, when rumors bloomed throughout the Yard about the possibility of sexual misconduct in a freshman dorm.

“It’s a voyeuristic topic, people want the details,” Homaifar said. “It’s like when people slow down in a car accident.”

Balancing what she saw as a need for meaningful dialogue with sensitivity was one of her foremost concerns for “Saturday Night.”

“You have to be careful not to exploit people’s stories,” Homaifar said. “It’s such a taboo issue that you’re representing, that it’s very easily sensationalized.”

FROM DUKE TO HARVARD

Harvard will be the second school to publish a “Saturday Night.”

Monica E. Lemmond, now a student at the Medical School, founded the original magazine while a Duke undergraduate in 2002.

Lemmond and her friends wanted to foster a forum for survivors. The magazine’s staff included Homaifar’s older sister, then a student at Duke.

“There were always copies of the magazines lying around the house,” Homaifer said. “So I grew up very familiar with it. I’ve been wanting to start ‘Saturday Night’ here since I got here.”

At last night’s launch of the Harvard publication, funded by the Anne Radcliffe Trust, Harvard College Women’s Center, and Undergraduate Council, Lemmond spoke about the original magazine and her entwined personal history.

“It’s really powerful how much the magazine has continued to reach survivors since it started,” Lemmond said. “I’m so happy to be here tonight. I hope that people pick it up, look through it, and take it home and talk about it.”

DIALOGUE?

But students remain concerned that raising awareness on campus doesn’t necessarily lead to a transformation in the way sexual assault is discussed, said Chas J. Hamilton ’07, a peer educator at the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response at Harvard (OSAPR).

“There’s always that kid with all these technical questions,” Hamilton said, “‘Is it sexual assault if I do this? How about this?’ Students sometimes focus on splitting legal hairs instead of promoting a consensual experience.”

Even students quick to address the issue in a closed discussion of hypotheticals might not be so enthusiastic to talk about sexual assault in a real-life context.

‘A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE’

“There’s only beginning to be a forum here at Harvard, because people don’t understand how pervasive the problem is,” said a male student who contributed a prose piece called “Darkroom.”

He wrote the piece about his struggle to deal with a previous experience of his girlfriend’s, he said.

“She reviewed every draft, and writing has been a very emotional and therapeutic process,” the student said last night. “I wanted to show a different perspective and the long-term effects of dealing with sexual assault.”

Another contributor wrote about an experience closer to home.

The student, a sophomore in Dunster, said she had been sexually assaulted by a stranger last summer at a job in the Northeast, and is now working through the repercussions.

“It’s definitely affected me long-term,” she said. “Like, if I go into a building now and a guy I don’t know follows me in, I automatically run up the stairs.”

She said she calls hotlines such as RESPONSE and an OSAPR-run phone number every now and then, but decided to tell her story to a larger audience through the magazine.

“I want to let other people know that does and can happen, and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.

Still, she chose to remain anonymous in both the magazine and in this interview, citing pending legal proceedings.

But, she added: “Part of it is that I don’t want people to look at me differently.”

—Staff writer Gracye Y. Cheng can be reached at gcheng@fas.harvard.edu.