You never think it’ll happen to you, but once it does, you’re initiated into a community that, hauntingly, grows larger and larger every day.
Your entire world is stolen from you and scattered into a story that you cannot piece together, but that you are forced to share and write with a pen that steals a bit of your courage every time sweat lets it slip from your grasp.
You lose motivation to continue; finishing papers and exams becomes impossible. You cannot even finish an application, even if it means enduring the pain of watching opportunity slip out of reach. These are the silent scars.
Project Dinah’s annual SpeakOut! in the Pit, the night in which the stories of survivors of sexual and interpersonal violence will break the silence, is tonight at 7 p.m. Most stories go untold, even less of these crimes go reported — but the reality of violence is undeniable, and survivors are all around you.
We live in a society that claims to “condemn” sexual violence, but that does little to inhibit the spread of this silent epidemic.
If there is a true condemnation of this issue, then why are college women four times more likely to be assaulted, and are then forced to fight to be believed? If this is a recognized epidemic, why do 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported, and 15 out of 16 rapists walk free?
Each survivor’s story has different roots, but we carry the same bruising: the bruising of not being believed, of shame, guilt and anger.
These invisible bruises inhibit us from even remembering the happiness of that Carolina acceptance letter.
The reality of sexual violence transcends every policy, every politician and every day that another survivor is forced to wear the veil of a victim.
