A Haven Behind Closed Doors

Behind a closed door in the basement of Lowell House, two counselors sit in a homey living room. Brightly colored couches, a butterfly chair, and a wooden coffee table fill out the warmly lit space. Here, the women of RESPONSE welcome 25 to 35 students who call and drop in each semester when they need to tell someone their stories.

In a corner, an old filing cabinet houses a 24-year history of sexual assault at Harvard.

That history is made up of notes on each caller and drop-in’s story, all told anonymously.

The student-run RESPONSE began in 1983 under the direction of a group of Harvard women who, according to current president Alexandra D. Kukunova ’08, “saw a need for the service on campus.”

In focusing on that need, RESPONSE predated the College’s own effort, which was founded in 2003 to oversee sexual assault education and resources.

The long road to the founding of these two prominent resources for sexual assault spans two decades. These 20 years are marked by policies, protests, and attempts to personalize anonymous stories by connecting them to representative faces.

Tonight, students will gather on the steps of Memorial Church, marking the last of this year’s Take Back the Night events. These students are continuing the recent tradition of trying to teach their peers about sexual assault—an effort that has been transformed, under the direction of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (OSAPR), into a standard aspect of the Harvard student experience.

BURDEN OF PROOF

Nowadays Harvard broaches the subject at the start of freshman year, requiring freshmen to attend mandatory workshops run by OSAPR.

But before the office was established, the administration dealt with the issue through the Administrative Board, a mechanism students criticized.

“In hindsight I feel that they were less helpful than they could have been,” remarked an unnamed student who had brought her sexual assault case before the Ad Board, in a 1999 issue of the student magazine Perspective.

Another interviewee, asked what the administration could have done better concerning her case, said, “Everything. I’ll say it again: everything...the administration doesn’t understand when something like this happens to a student.”

Catherine Shapiro, the secretary of the Ad Board, said the board’s procedures for dealing with peer disputes have changed since 1999 to make the system “timelier” and to give students an opportunity to be heard while protecting their privacy.

“Members of the board really do have a sense of how painful and traumatic sexual assault can be,” Shapiro said in an interview. “The Ad Board understands that coming forward with and responding to an allegation of sexual assault are difficult for the students involved.”

In 2002, the Faculty approved a change to Ad Board policy requiring students to submit “sufficient independent corroboration” before they could get their cases heard.

The more stringent standard sparked protests among students on the grounds that it put a burden on alleged victims that could discourage them from coming forward.

After a student anonymously submitted a complaint about the rule tightening, the U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation to determine whether the University was violating federal laws against sex discrimination. Eight months later, the inquiry concluded that Harvard had not violated federal regulations.

By then, the College had already set up the Committee to Address Sexual Assault at Harvard in an effort to ease student concerns about the new policy.

The committee’s final report set the groundwork for the establishment and funding of OSAPR, and since 2003 the office has been up and running.

“Harvard students are really fortunate to have the services that they have,” said Sarah Rankin, director of OSAPR. “The funding, support, and the dialogue we’re starting with students is inspiring.”

‘THIS ISN’T GOING TO AFFECT ME’

Yet today’s students may see sexual assault education as an unnecessary time commitment rather than a privilege.

“Students are really resistant at first,” said Tracy Nowski ’07, a peer counselor at OSAPR. “Girls will say, ‘Why do I have to sit through this?’ or, ‘This isn’t going to affect me.’”

And the feeling has not been limited to women.

“It’s the same for guys,” said Chas J. Hamilton ‘07, another peer educator at OSAPR. “What I say is, ‘This may not have happened to you, but imagine it happening to your close friend or sister.’ For a lot of people it brings it home. Our job is to try and help imagine and visualize, just looking at the statistics, how someone will have to deal with it on some personal level.”

“It’s difficult to make sexual assault immediately meaningful to somebody who hasn’t had a personal experience. It’s going to take a while,” Rankin said, “It’s not going to be like, wow, we just cured sex assault! God, I wish.”

THE PRICE OF ANONYMITY

A major obstacle to educating students is a lack of statistics pertaining specifically to Harvard’s campus. While HUPD keeps records of how many “forcible sexual offenses” occur each year on the campus, such numbers are traditionally believed to be underreported, and student counseling groups do not release precise data on their own callers.

“We want to ensure our clients complete anonymity,” said Josh C. Wertheimer ’08, president of the general peer-counseling group Room 13. “It’s also really difficult to determine if a case is sexual assault or not—someone who has been sexually assaulted may initially come to us for another reason.”

Other organizations dealing directly with sexual assault have a similar policy, refusing to track or release too much information about cases because of confidentiality issues.

“We don’t track calls but we do track callers,” Rankin said. “Last term we had 50 new clients access OSAPR services. Most called about a recent or past sexual assault, but some were seeking services for dating violence, harassment, or stalking incidents.”

And the records are similarly private at University Health Services, where Harvard students would presumably go for urgent care.

“I don’t have access to records,” said Maureen Rezendes, a staff psychologist. “And it’s really too difficult to keep track of how many and what exactly are sexual assault cases.”

THE OLD FILING CABINET

The lack of statistics can complicate efforts to offer resources.

RESPONSE staff say they receive about 25-35 calls and drop-ins each semester, but have no way of characterizing the callers by gender, class, or other measures.

Kukunova, the group’s president, opened the old filing cabinet in the corner of its Lowell office.

The records for most years since RESPONSE’s founding in 1983 showed a number of calls “in the 30s. A few went up to 40 or so,” she said.

One counselor, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitive nature of her duties, said that when she first started, she received few calls, and wondered about the need for the program.

Caitlin B. McKee ’06, a former volunteer for RESPONSE, took the opposite view.

“I personally found it surprising how many calls there are,” said McKee, a former Crimson magazine editor. “But even if just one person called during the whole semester it would still justify RESPONSE being an available service. That we helped one person is reason enough to exist.”

“You never know how many rapes you prevent because, well, they don’t happen,” said Nowski, who also works with the Freshman Residential Education Program.

She remembered walking through the Yard and being stopped by a freshman.

“She was like, ‘Do you remember that joke you made? I was with a guy and it was at that point where it was really awkward and I didn’t know what to say, and I told him the joke and it helped,’” Nowski recalled. “So you never know when a comment that you make at a workshop sinks in.”

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