09/17/2014
TW: R**e and Sexual Violence
My heart goes out to the women of Columbia University who are putting their names and faces and voices on the line on behalf of themselves and others who have experienced sexual assault there. They have been speaking out against the men who commit these crimes and against the inadequate institutional response. With terrific courage, they have been making a public witness and demanding only the most basic of human decencies—punishment for offenders. The same is being asked for women having suffered physical abuse from their partners, as we are seeing at the same time in the NFL world now. Last April, we at Skidmore were helped to face our own incidents, reported and un-reported, through the moving performance called “On the Record” at Falstaff’s. My heart goes out to the Skidmore women, too.
Sexual assault is the most personal of violations. It reaches where soul and sinew meet. It marks a person’s spirit most profoundly. It can be survived. It can be healed. But it cannot be cancelled, not without contrition and compensation, and those are hard to come by in a male-structured world. Force of that kind can be nearly indelible.
So, maybe all of this needs to be put on a more personal basis for men. Yes, these are crimes that violate laws which are on the books. Everybody know that. But, more fundamentally, these are human rights violations. These are outright attacks on the personhood of another, beyond what is codified in the criminal code. It is a form of homicide for, as anybody should know who hears these women testify, a part of someone sexually assaulted has indeed been killed.
It is very possible that this is precisely the intention of the perpetrators of such violence and that they revel in the lawlessness of it. Then I can only say to them, they commit a double-homicide, in that part of them is made dead, too. And maybe that is irrationally also part of their intention. The debasement of others sometimes seems to satisfy the need for self-debasement. It is an awful circle, one of the circles of hell, in fact.
Who can explain it? Who needs to explain it, when it is so clearly, palpably and universally wrong?? If we are silent, the very stones will cry out, so inhuman is the act of r**e. I just want to raise some hue and cry—and raise the roof!
Richard Noel Chrisman, Director of Religious and Spiritual Life
