Illustration by Gemma Fa-Kaji
Women everywhere are speaking up about sexual abuse and harassment. From the #MeToo movement exposing Harvey Weinstein, to the #TimesUp movement fighting to end the age of “excusable” workplace harassment, to Olympic gymnasts coming out as having been abused by their trainer, it seems that the culture of silence that abusers rely on is finally being shattered. But sexual harassment is not always as obvious as unwanted physical contact or sexual solicitations – many times it can be invisible, and victims are often not given a language or pathway to articulate their abuse.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience with sexual harassment, it’s that it is always determined by the experience of the victim, and that every student needs to be given the tools to identify and prevent harassment earlier, before the twin cultures of silence and objectification can take hold.
When I was in sixth grade, one of the boys in my class started following and staring at me constantly. This harassment continued for four years, starting when I waited for the water fountain behind him and he apparently interpreted my passive look at him as flirting, and not ending until I attended a Berkeley High School (BHS) Stop Harassing teach-in in ninth grade and finally learned the definition of sexual harassment. I had several adults I trusted at the time, but still didn’t tell anyone — someone or something had given me the impression that what I was experiencing wasn’t “real” harassment, that I just had to deal with it, and, more insidiously, that it was at least partially my fault. The reactions of others, even to the most obvious incidents of harassment, didn’t help. At one point, when I was crossing the room, my harasser crushed me sidelong into the wall. My classmates laughed. People told me he thought I had a crush on him. When I finally worked up the courage to tell my friends about it, they laughed too, telling me “he’s not that kind of person.”
The harassment made me miserable and terrified, for reasons no one had given me the language to articulate. The sexual harassment presentations in seventh and eighth grade were about unwanted solicitations and groping, not the less obvious forms of harassment I experienced. Yet the effects on me were measurable: I made myself small and wore big jackets. I made a mental and visual block across the side of the classroom where he sat.
When I gave presentations, I looked at the slides, not at my classmates, afraid that I’d look at him accidentally and again be utterly misunderstood. I made up monologues in my head, never spoken, telling him to stop; started carrying the trash from my lunch home as opposed to throwing it away at school, fearful he’d look me over at the trash cans a third time; and took alternate routes to lose him on the way to class. I raised my hand less. No one was looking at me as a victim — I had straight A’s and a stable home life — and even my parents thought I was just insecure.
When I attended the BHS Stop Harassing teach-in in ninth grade, part of me was already resigned to never telling anyone. It had been easier to lose my harasser in the vastness of BHS than in middle school. There were still a few times when I saw him in the hallways and he tried to follow me, but I mostly didn’t think of the miseries that had marked my middle school years. I was consumed by other ways of digging myself out of insecurity. But when the BHS Stop Harassing peer educators defined sexual harassment as anything unwanted, anything that decreases the victim’s quality of life, something in me clicked.
That day, I went home and told my mother; later that week, we went to my counselor. I wrote a statement and the intervention counselor forwarded it to him. Even then, another counselor summarized my experience as “an uncomfortable misunderstanding.” My mother corrected her — the harassment had, of course, gone on for years. We met with the intervention counselor again, after she’d talked to him, and she told me he didn’t want to get in trouble, perhaps even that he was sorry. He never bothered me again.
I often think of what it would’ve taken to make me speak up earlier. If we’d had presentations on the full range of sexual harassment in sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth grade. If my friends hadn’t dismissed my claims. If the harassment had been “real,” if someone had simply told me that it wasn’t my fault — the speculation goes on. I trusted my parents and teachers and counselor: every framework was there, save the understanding and language to articulate what was being inflicted on me.
Above all, I wish my sixth grade self had been given not only the tools to speak up, but a school culture in which speaking up felt safe enough. The impetus, in the long run, should never be on the victim, but instead on every one of us, to educate ourselves and be open enough to recognize when someone else is being hurt — indeed, to recognize when we are hurting someone ourselves.