FEATURE RAPE. CASE.
An Instagram account wages war on sexual assault at CWRU By Sam Allard “IT ALL STARTED AT A ZBT PARTY. “This was not one of their ‘official’ parties, so all bets were off. It started innocent enough. I was a freshman hanging out with cool fraternity brothers. I started getting drunk and then all of a sudden felt it. I had been roofied. Four of the brothers took me away from the party, and I didn’t realize what was happening. “Once we got back to a private room, that’s when it happened. Something snapped in them. One of them smacked me on the face and told me if I did what they asked I wouldn’t get hurt. They ripped my pants off and started doing lines of coke on my butt, and then they all took me at once. They forced me to take all of them at once…” So begins a July 21st post on Instagram, written and submitted for publication by an anonymous undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University. The post is one of hundreds — literally hundreds — that have appeared since July 4th on the @CWRU. survivors account, jolting a summerbreaking student body upright like non-stop cracks of thunder. The posts describe a vast spectrum of sexual misconduct on the campus of Case, Ohio’s topranked university: from unwanted advances, offensive language, drunken handsiness and general “creepy” behavior at parties; to nonconsensual activity during consensual sex; to egregious misogyny within fraternities; to gang rape. In many cases, these posts also describe a profound lack of institutional support for survivors of assault, and university systems of reporting and discipline so ineffectual that they have exacerbated trauma. Like at other college campuses where “drunk hookup culture” is pervasive and boundaries are often crossed, survivors are aware of, and often powerless against, the inequities inherent in bureaucratic university structures. Case has a women’s center, a Title IX office, an office of equity, an office of
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student affairs and a Greek life office on campus, but current and former students told Scene that these offices fulfill specific roles, and none of them is to support survivors. The system is designed not only to protect predominantly male assaulters, they say, but to shield the university itself from reputational damage. As the @CWRU.survivors account demonstrates, many students have foregone reporting their assaults entirely to avoid the humiliation and presumed disappointment that lurk along the official avenues available to them. “My Title IX experience was somehow more traumatic than the actual incident,” one post read. That’s a big reason why the account has exploded the way it has, students told Scene. Many
| clevescene.com | August 26-September 1, 2020
of the published submissions are from seniors and recent grads who admit that their posts are the first time they’ve opened up about their experiences. Other submissions, and indeed, comments on published posts, have come from older alums, who are in a position to corroborate the persistence of bad behavior. The individual posts can be horrifying to read. But more horrifying is the aggregate picture, in which rape culture is omnipresent on campus. The two anonymous administrators of the account told Scene that they were flooded with submissions once they took the account live at 1 p.m. on July 4. “We’ve been in contact with similar accounts at other universities,” one of the admins told Scene. “And they all basically
said, ‘Holy shit, you have a ton of submissions.’ They couldn’t believe it. They had numbers in the 30s or 40s. We got more than 600 in three weeks. Our bubble is obviously limited, but we’ve seen nothing on a scale like this.” The total submissions now number close to 750. And as students prepare to return to campus, or log on remotely for a largely virtual fall semester, the @CWRU.survivors shockwaves have crested and evolved. The slew of graphic reports naming specific fraternities have led many to call for the abolition of Greek Life entirely on campus, (provoking unexpected reckonings for many assault survivors who belong to, and value, sororities). Others worry that students have
