Photo taken by Carly Novell
By Carly Novell, EIC News
On Saturday, at the Class of 2020-2021 Commencement, GW Protects Rapists held a silent protest for the first phase of their plan in advocating for survivors on campus. Beginning in Kogan Plaza, attendees gathered and made signs before heading to the National Mall.
Sexual assault survivors Abby Canning and Stephanie Lee were brought together after GW’s Office of Advocacy and Support accidentally included Lee in an email chain regarding Canning’s case. After this breach of confidentiality, the two seniors realized that they were facing similar issues in the Title IX office’s handling of their respective cases, and thus, GW Protects Rapists was revived.
“A lot of people believe that they’re on their own with all of this but it’s actually a very prominent thing,” Lee said. “With my case, I thought I was in a unique situation and then I found out Abby is going through the same exact thing. So the more that we share our experiences, the more that we’re able to establish a pattern, and hopefully admin will realize that and want to change it.”
The movement aims for more transparency across the board as well as standardization of the campus barring process, especially for non-students, GW faculty, alumni and others unaffiliated with GW. As of now, the campus barring process for non-students is at the discretion of the GW Police Department. Additionally, the students are asking for guaranteed long-term budget and resource allocation to the office of advocacy and support which Canning says is the only office that has “actually been helpful in fighting through all this negligence from GW.”
“We decided to do multiple phases because we were pretty confident that one phase alone wouldn’t be enough to get the results that we wanted,” Canning said. “No matter how successful our graduation protest was going to be, we just simply couldn’t anticipate GW coming around and granting all of our demands after just one movement so we wanted to make sure that there would be multiple next steps so that we had a game plan to keep fighting.”
GW Protects Rapists initially started in 2017 when a senior who was found guilty of sexual assault did not face consequences that made survivor Aniqua Raihan feel unsafe on campus. When she was a senior and the abuser was allowed to walk at graduation, Raihan and other students displayed a banner at the Columbian Commencement Ceremony that said “GW Protects Rapists” for everyone to see.
“I feel like this movement is something that has been needed for a long time… The fact that it happened in 2017, and nothing has changed since [shows] the need for it to be revived is so prominent right now. It requires immediate change and immediate action,” Lee said.
GW Students Against Sexual Assault supported the survivors who organized the protest using their role as a GW-affiliated organization to meet with the administration and help GW Protects Rapists achieve their goals of making survivors safer on campus.
“The most tangible example of how GW Protects Rapists is the reason that the organizers have chosen to demonstrate at commencement, which is that GW has invited two classes back to campus without any real outreach or supportive measures to survivors whose perpetrators may be returning to campus for commencement,” co-president of GW SASA, Will Hoadley-Brill said.
Ahead of the protest, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion which oversees Title IX, responded to students’ concerns about the shortcomings of Title IX. The response was posted on @InclusionAtGW’s Instagram story and on the Title IX website.
“Confusion and misinformation surrounding the university’s response to Title IX-related issues may cause individuals to feel reluctant to report incidents, which in turn means that they may not get connected to the resources and supportive measures they need and deserve,” the statement wrote. “This can also create unsafe conditions for our community and make it difficult for the Title IX Office to detect patterns where they exist.”
On the @GWProtectsRapists Instagram, the students made a post breaking down inaccuracies within the statement. Canning said the statement “was just really deflecting all the blame which really stung as a survivor and organizer.”
57 student organizations and 253 individual students co-signed GW SASA’s statement outlining demands for the GW Administration to address. Lee said that about 100 people attended the protest.
“The allyship and camaraderie aspect that has come out of the woodwork between different organizations while we’re doing this has been phenomenal,” Canning said. “It has been so incredibly reassuring to see that so many different students and organizations stand with us, and it has really helped me connect with the campus community a little bit more. I don’t think any of us anticipated the amount of support and response that we’d get from the students and student organizations as a whole.”
Canning launched a petition in April 2020 that received nearly 3,000 supporters urging GW to bring justice to survivors. Since being back on campus, Canning along with other survivors, have the ability to address their concerns in person through protest and other demonstrations.
“I wish survivor advocacy on campus was less important because if it was less important, that would mean that GW and Title IX are doing their jobs. Unfortunately, they’re not sticking up for us,” Canning said. “So it’s become critical that we as survivors do, because nobody else is. The role of survivor advocacy right now is just stepping in and doing the people’s jobs that aren’t performing them until we can get justice and safety.”
GW Protects Rapists is continuing to work with SASA and plans to announce more information on the second phase in the next few days depending on GW administration’s response to the protest and demands.
