Renewed discussions over Title IX bring up long-held concerns of sexual assault’s intersection with racial injustice (Flickr).

CW: racism, sexual assault, gender-based violence

The U.S. Department of Education published a letter on April 6 announcing that it would hold a hearing for comments on Title IX. This move comes in response to President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity to review Title IX regulations. This action comes almost a year after the Department of Education under Betsy Devos added new regulations to Title IX allowing cross-examinations and live questioning of survivors, which several people argue could prevent survivors from coming forward.

In the most recent report of Know Your IX, an advocacy organization aimed at informing students about their right to an education free from gender-based violence, students mentioned how school administrations ignored their grievances, blamed people for what happened to them, and denied them support, demonstrating how Title IX is insufficient to support survivors of sexual assault.

While survivors everywhere push for more survivor-informed regulations and protections, Black survivors point out that these regulations must take into account historical inequities and racial injustice. Black women on college campuses, including Georgetown, face a lack of support from their institutions and communities.

Struggling for Support on Campus

Black college students at Columbia University and Barnard College detailed to the Washington Post the hypersexualization they experienced. The sixteen Black women who were interviewed all revealed that they faced unwanted sexual touching. In a Columbia University study, compared to other races and ethnicities, Black women were twice as likely to have faced unwanted touching.

While expanding prevention programs at universities like these predominantly focus on alcohol awareness and bystander training, these measures insufficiently address intimate partner sexual violence.

For Black women, sexual assault often occurs in more intimate settings, after which reporting sexual violence becomes an issue of community division. When Venkayla Haynes was sexually assaulted by a Morehouse student who was her friend, the university administration blamed her for going out alone with her assaulter, who faced no institutional punishment.

In her article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a lawyer and academic whose scholarship has been seminal in the development of intersectional feminism, describes the lenient punishment of Black men for raping Black women as best explained “in terms of both the race- and gender-based devaluation of Black women.”

Crenshaw explains how anti-racist activists often ignore the stories of Black women to avoid confirming negative stereotypes of Black men as dangerous sexual predators. Furthermore, violence towards Black women is not only swept under the rug but supported in the community. Shahrazad Ali, the author of The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, has gone as far as suggesting that Black men should physically abuse Black women to improve the Black community. In these situations, the community’s interests are reduced to Black men at the expense of Black women.

Haynes said, “We always come to these situations where we can’t come forward because we want to protect Black men or protect our Black brothers because they’re already fighting against a system that further criminalizes them.” Black survivors of sexual violence are pressured to weigh protecting the image of their community against their safety and raising the issue of intracommunity violence. On top of this, they also experience rampant sexualization and fetishization from both within and outside their community.

Kamilah Willingham is a Black activist, feminist, speaker, and writer who was attending Harvard Law school when a classmate sexually assaulted her. When Willingham reported the sexual assault to Cambridge police and the school, she felt that the way she was questioned indicated that she was being stereotyped. She explained, “When people see me, they’ve already got a template for trying to understand me. It’s usually going to be 90 percent stereotypes and misconceptions. They are trying to reconcile me with what they think a Black woman should be. I already knew that. It’s not that I forgot that I was Black, I forgot that it mattered.”

Hypersexualization and Devaluation

Since the early 15th century, hypersexualized notions of Black women have permeated popular political and cultural beliefs. In Western colonization, the idea that Black women were objects of sexual desire justified enslavement, sexual violence and coercion, and forced reproduction. This process was used to culturally justify the dehumanization of Black and Indigenous women for European imperialist gain.

Historically, the accounts of sexual assault by Black women have long been ignored. In 1944, Recy Taylor was walking home from church when six white men abducted and raped her at gunpoint. Tried by an all-white male jury, within five minutes her case was dismissed despite physical evidence and multiple witnesses.

Crenshaw explains this phenomenon by discussing how Black women have been hypersexualized in the media to the point that there is a perception that they cannot be raped. Social norms conceive of “good women” as being able to be raped and “bad women” as women who cannot be. Since Black women are conceived as “bad women” within the racial hierarchy, the concept of consent has been essentially nullified. Black women who report sexual assault are less likely to be believed than white women, like in Taylor’s case, while the men receive shorter sentences when they are found guilty.

Standing Up to Institutional Silence

The Georgetown Black Survivors Coalition held sit-ins in Georgetown’s Healy Hall in protest of insufficient responses to sexual violence (Wikimedia Commons).

Last year the Georgetown Black Survivors Coalition (BSC) responded to the culture of institutional disregard for Black survivors with social action. The group formed in Fall 2019 to call for improved sexual assault resources, especially for Black femme and nonbinary survivors after years of ignored demands. On February 24, 2020, activists from the Black Survivors Coalition came together to occupy Healy Hall outside DeGioia’s office.

The BSC initially sent a list of ten demands to DeGioia’s office on January 27 with a request for a public response from the University by January 31. After only being met with an email response declaring support for equity on campus sent to leaders of Black campus organizations, the coalition protested in Red Square on February 21.

In protest of both the culture of inaction in the cases of sexual assault towards Black women and the University’s shortcomings in responses to initial demands, BSC organized sit-ins from 9 am to 12 am each day after February 24 until their demands for resources were met by the administration, using the slogan of protest #GeorgetownDoesntCare.

The BSC prompted the Georgetown administration to commit to hiring clinicians of color, create an off-campus mental health fund, improve the SafeRide program, expand crisis-response resources, and strengthen the Women’s Center’s capacity to address gender-based violence. The school also responded to the protests by promising to extend bystander training, which is required for all new students through registration holds.

However, campus data shows that changes solely involving bystander intervention training by itself are insufficient. Rates of sexual assault in the 2019 Sexual Assault and Misconduct Climate survey are similar to those in 2016 despite prevention measures like increased bystander training, which as discussed do not address sexual assault that happens in relationships and outside of public settings.

In the 2020 Campus Cultural Climate Survey, 60.7 percent of respondents did not agree that Health Education Services, the program overseeing Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Services at Georgetown, addresses their needs sufficiently. Furthermore, 68.2 percent of respondents did not agree that they “trust Georgetown’s leadership to meaningfully address inequities (e.g., problems related to racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.).”

In the 2019 Association of American Universities (AAU) Campus Climate Survey, Georgetown had higher rates of sexual assault than other universities participating in the survey. 31.6 percent of Georgetown undergraduate women reported sexual assault compared to the AAU aggregate of 25.9 percent. Rates of sexual assault among males were also at a higher rate of 11.6 percent compared to the AAU aggregate of 9.6 percent.

While the BSC achieved commitments to change from the Georgetown administration, it comes amid a history of silence toward the violence faced by Black survivors throughout history and on campus—the protests began after the university ignored the petitions of the STOP Coalition for more sexual violence resources for Black survivors, including hiring an additional Black trauma specialist. Kayla Friedland, a student at Georgetown, recognizes that the University’s response was a reaction to how the movement escalated its protests. Friedland told the Voice, “We are now at their doorsteps and we are actively making them uncomfortable. But it is what we have to do to get progress.”

If you require resources regarding Title IX, sexual violence or reporting forms, you can refer to Georgetown’s online resources:

https://sexualassault.georgetown.edu/

You can also access resources outside of Georgetown at:

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network:

1-800-656-4673

https://www.rainn.org/resources

The Safe Sisters Circle:

https://safesisterscircle.org/

The Women's Center:

https://thewomenscenter.org/services/domestic-violence-sexual-assault/