Title IX: Surviving through Literature: Home

Drawing upon over ten years of research and conversations with real college students, Consent on Campus: A Manifesto sheds light on issues surrounding sexual assault on college campuses. Freitas enters this conversation with a new and powerful standpoint, stating that not only is the culture surrounding sexual assault on college campuses wrong, but also that the way universities approach educating their students on sexual assault is completely wrong. Her argument lies upon the fact that universities should state why it is important for students to care about consent, as opposed to just informing them about how to consent.

Focusing on the impactful movement regarding sexual assault on college campuses, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, draws attention to the change makers: college students. Grigoriadis attempts to relay the powerful and fervent message that college students are sending out across the nation in an attempt to shatter the existing culture on campus. The image painted of this fight also includes the challenging of sexuality norms and sexism ingrained in the educational system.

Germain forwards the idea that college officials including educators, administrators, etc. should be paying more attention to what women go through after an incident of sexual assault. The author points out the frequent fixation upon what leads to rape, and suggests that considering the timeline, the hours, days, and years, following sexual assaults may be more beneficial. Germain argues that this helps institutions recognize where the faults in their systems are in order to produce change.

Making a fierce statement, Gay discusses how cruel of a world it is for women to constantly face harassment, violence, aggression, and more. It is crafted in the format of twenty nine essays each written by a different person. Many of these narratives come from personal experiences and comment on gender inequality and rape culture. Gay offers a space for women to share their stories as she recognizes that many women minimize their trauma.

A "powerful and scary and important and true" memoir of a young woman's struggle to regain her sense of self after trauma, and the efforts by a powerful New England boarding school to silence her--at any cost (Sally Mann, author of Hold Still). Shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing When Notes on a Silencing hit bookstores in the summer of 2020, even amidst a global pandemic, it sent shockwaves through the country. Not only did this intimate investigative memoir usher in a media storm of coverage, but it also prompted the elite St. Paul's School to issue a formal apology to the author, Lacy Crawford, for its handling of her report of sexual assault by two fellow students nearly thirty years ago. In this searing book, Crawford tells the story of coming forward during the state investigation of the elite New England prep school decades after her assault, only to find for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hardworking girl she'd been, as well as astonishing proof of an institutional silencing. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been imagined; they were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.   This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry deep into gender, privilege, and power, and the ways shame and guilt are used to silence victims. Insightful, arresting, and beautifully written, Notes on a Silencing wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy? "Erudite and devastating... Crawford's writing is astonishing... Notes on a Silencing is a purposefully named, brutal and brilliant retort to the asinine question of 'Why now?'... The story is crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling..." --Jessica Knoll, New York Times A Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, People, Real Simple, Marie Claire, The Lineup, LitHub, Library Journal, BookPage, and Shelf Awareness A New York Times Book Review Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of People Magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year Semifinalist for a Goodreads Choice Award

Harding highlights the argument that modern day America better supports rapists than those who are victims of rape. This is done through in-depth research and examples of institutional failure on college campuses through higher education administration. Harding adds to the scope of college campus rape culture by unpacking examples of rape in the larger world. The mission of this work is to evaluate how both college officials and society as a whole can take sexual violence more seriously without compromising the rights of either the victims or those accused of sexual violence.

This work is a collection of hand selected articles written by professionals as well as those with personal experiences regarding sexual assault. Many of the articles highlight statistics of sexual assault on college campuses including how incidents often go unreported, in addition to the policies that are in place at institutions across the nation. Each piece of work covers a different facet of a different perspective; the perpetrator, the victim, and the bystander.

Chanel Miller's memoir Know My Name is one of the most well-known sexual assault narratives, detailing her experience as Emily Doe, more frequently referred to as "Brock Turner's victim." Miller's memoir opens up a new dimension to the wider conversation on sexual assault, campus sexual assault, and broader violence against women, namely in the way she discusses the failures of the legal system in obtaining justice for her and her own internal struggle with closure and moving on.

In the Dream House is a uniquely told memoir by Carmen Maria Machado that sheds a light on the issue of assault and sexual violence in LGBTQ+ spaces and relationships. Machado tells her story in second person, inviting the reader to experience her abuse through her eyes and finally acknowledge the importance of discussions surrounding the varying types of sexual violence that can occur in queer relationships and they ways in which they are frequently hidden or dismissed by more popular, heterosexual narratives.

Speak is one of the most well-known and most widely read fictional narratives of sexual assault. Set in high school and written for a middle/high school audience, Speak is remarkable in the way it aided the conversation surrounding sexual assault on such a large scale well before the #MeToo movement began. Anderson's novel is written for an age range that does not typically hear these kinds of stories, which is one of the many things that makes this novel continue to come up in conversation, even today.

The Nowhere Girls is a novel that, at first glance, is about three girls speaking out against the rape culture prevalent in their high school. However, the book tackles a much larger conceit, branching out in POVs to include "us"—girls around town who are also affected by the sexist climate. The Nowhere Girls is written for a teenage audience, bringing the conversation to a younger demographic to help them work through what they might be experiencing in high school, but Reed's novel has an important message that can be heard at any age.

Girl Made of Stars is not a typical "rape narrative." The book follows Mara in the aftermath of her best friend accusing her twin brother of rape, making the novel more about Mara's struggle with believing her friend and trusting her brother than her friend's experience. At its core, though, the book provides a perspective that is often overlooked in sexual assault narratives, choosing to focus on the messiness of life (particularly for teenagers), as well as the problems surrounding hearing and believing survivors.

Sadie is not about sexual assault in the same way as the other books in this guide. Summers' book deals more specifically with pedophilia and childhood sexual assault, and what happens when the victim takes the matter into her own hands. Sadie is, at its core, a revenge narrative that allows the reader to come to their own conclusion about whether Sadie is doing the right thing and leaves the reader with little closure, reflecting the lack of closure many victims feel in the aftermath of their assault.

Beartown follows a conservative hockey town that is going steadily downhill and relying on its hockey team to help bring in money and acclaim. This is all disrupted when the star player rapes the coach's young daughter and splits the town in two. Beartown is significant because of the way it deals with the community aspect of public assaults, the ripples in has in lives other than the victim's, and what happens when the legal system doesn't work to support victims.