Photo credits: Amazon
Author’s note:
I interviewed Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale who is the author of College Girl: A Memoir, which tells the story of her experience with sexual assault as a college student and her long, complex journey from trauma to recovery. The biography is an incredibly inspirational story of hope, friendship, and resilience. The book was awarded the Independent Publishers Gold Medal Award in Memoir and has been read in a copious number of classes on gender issues, sociology, and criminal justice in the U.S. Her story serves as an inspiration to sexual assault survivors and those interested in the fields of criminal law and women’s rights. This article provides a transcript of the interview for readers to learn from.
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Jurisview Journal: Why do you believe it is so important for sexual assault survivors to share their stories, and how do you think this would positively impact both the individual survivors and the broader community?
Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale: First, I want to say thank you for inviting me to speak about these very important issues.
I thought I'd start with some statistics about sexual violence on college campuses, first in the U.S. and then globally. So between 2015 and 2021, the total number of sexual offenses reported at higher education institutions increased by 23 percent. Surveys and experts indicate that the number of total offenses that occur on campuses is much larger than that due to underreporting. “Sexual violence is commonly reported on university campuses around the world with alarmingly high rates. Globally, the prevalence rate of sexual assault on undergraduate students has been estimated at 10.3 percent in women and 3.1 percent in men.” (Mzilangwe 2024) So, we know that this is a very, very serious issue and happens far, far too much, and as noted in that article, often underreported. Too often I think survivor stories are silenced by people and institutions because they're simply too uncomfortable for other people to take in.
This is the case most likely because our stories disrupt the idea that everything is simply okay, and without our stories being told, I think people can just rest easier. If people do not speak about it, maybe it'll just go away, is the thinking there. Maybe then we can gloss it all over, and pretend that sexual violence is not really happening at those alarming rates that I just cited. So survivor stories, I think, are really crucial because they expose these facts—that we live in a world that simply does not fight hard enough against sexual violence as a crucial social and political issue.
Survivor stories are also not easy to hear for some because what we have experienced is often incredibly chaotic and traumatic, and as a result, we can't always tell our stories in this linear, singular way. So, there may be gaps that survivors have around our memories. I think that’s sometimes used as evidence against survivors themselves and taken to be indicative of the idea of the fact that, well, maybe the events did not actually happen to them. We know that there are gaps in memory. This is how the brain works to deal with traumatic situations. “Cognitive models highlight the nature of the traumatic memory fragmented, associated with intense arousal, readily primed and triggered, and poorly contextualized into memory. (Ehlers & Clark 2000) As a result, memories of traumatic events such as sexual assault can be fragmentary. It can be difficult for victims to recall many details of a sexual assault in a complete or linear way.”
I also wanted to say this: It's really okay to make people feel uncomfortable.
In fact, I think that sometimes it's really good to make people feel uncomfortable. It can often lead to social justice actions and to cultural changes. It's hard. It's hard on us. It's hard on the people who are hearing it from us, but that's what's going to get things done. That's what's going to change things.
So, sharing survivor stories is directly challenging the idea that sexual violence is some private issue rather than a community-wide problem, and sharing survivor stories helps to reveal that we all have a civic responsibility around sexual assault. If we don't talk about it and bring it into the light, it's going to simply grow and continue to be greater and greater of a problem as time goes on. So, I think that the sharing of survivor stories helps to create greater connections between survivors who may otherwise feel very isolated in their experiences. I mean, all of a sudden, it's not about one person's experiences, and I think that's increasingly where we need to head in our thinking about sexual violence.
Jurisview Journal: You mentioned that you have met many university student survivors over the years. Could you share what it was like hearing about their experiences?
Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale: Absolutely. So as I was saying before, I think that survivors sharing their stories can create crucial personal support systems, and survivors sharing their stories can also promote greater social justice around sexual violence and really put pressure on institutions to bring offenders to justice.
So after I wrote my memoir, I was able to travel around the U.S. a bit and go to university campuses and speak to university students about that memoir and my own experiences as well as their experiences. I would do these book signings and students would come up to me and it would blow my mind.
This would happen every single time I went to a different school. At least a handful of students would come up to me and stand in line to get their book signed and say, “When I read your story, it was like you were talking about me, and I've never read anything out there that sounds like it's talking about me and what I went through.”
So the specifics of our sexual violence experiences may have been different, and the cultural context may have been different, the historical moments may have been different, but the experiences themselves and the feelings that came along with being sexually violated were, I would say, fundamentally the same. We survivors seem to know one another, even if we've had these radically different experiences. So these moments that I had with university students, they have touched me deeply. I oftentimes found myself as they were, bawling some of them, also tearing up because that's exactly why I wanted to write this book so that other student survivors would not feel so alone in their experiences.
I also met with some really interesting survivor support groups on campuses, and these were students who are really politically active on their campuses and one of the things that really struck me about meeting those groups was here were people from a different generation than myself who had great passion, great strength, and great courage.
It made me so happy, and I really believe that generations of survivors who are coming after me are making key changes in how sexual assault is treated on university campuses and in our world together. So that was a real gift to me to meet them and to learn about their experiences.
Jurisview Journal: You also took on a project of creating a more scholarly book with Lexington Press that focuses on sexual violence in the academy. Could you explain what inspired you to take on this book project?
Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale: Yeah, definitely. So after I wrote and published my own story, I knew I was not done. This was kind of a stepping stone to something else. I had met some people in my travels to university campuses, of course, who are also survivors and I wanted them to be able to speak with one another in a scholarly context across the pages. Essentially, I wanted to build a community of survivors through the project, so I invited some specific people I'd met in my travels to participate, and then I also did an open call to survivors.
All of these people that I have in the book are either people who were assaulted in a university setting, or, in many cases, now work in a university setting. The things that they have also gone on to achieve with their lives in spite of this and sometimes because of this, it's just stunning. Many of the people I included have become professors, writers, advocates of various kinds, social justice workers, etc. In most cases, this was the first time they had ever published anything about their own stories, so it was a huge step for each one of them. I think what made it easier was that they were doing it alongside other survivors, and we were having conversations as a group about working on these pieces. It was also a different kind of editing experience than I've ever had before because it had to be very collaborative.
I wanted to just mention Dr. Sally Kenny, who heads up the Newcomb Institute at Tulane, or she did at the time at any rate, which focuses on gender issues specifically. She was one of the contributors to this book, and she would go on to organize a whole conference at Tulane about this book and survivor stories. I just want to mention a shout-out to Sally. She's conducted wonderful interviews of survivors herself, and I do recommend to listeners to check it out.
Jurisview Journal: How has this book project become valuable to you personally?
Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale: Oh, thanks. So like all survivors, I think many of the survivors who work in the academy don't know that other people like them exist, and part of what that project was about was, “Hey, we do all exist,” and even if people don't talk about it publicly, they're going to be other students in your classes who are survivors. Your university staff members are going to be survivors. Your professors are going to be survivors. And so a book like this, I think, exposes the fact that there are so many people with different stories everywhere within a university setting.
So when I was 20 years old and a survivor of sexual assault at that age, I was really fortunate to meet a wonderful young professor whose name is Dr. Linda Alcoff. She was also an outspoken survivor, and she invited me to write a piece with her about the importance of survivors speaking out. She was an amazing role model for me personally, and she helped me and several other survivors to form survivor support groups on my university campus.
From a fairly young age, I could see that while what happened to me and what happens to all of us survivors utterly broke me and continue to impact my life in ways that I'm still beginning to understand, I could also rebuild myself with the help of loved ones and have a positive future beyond this experience. So, that's that's how my own experiences fit into this.
Jurisview Journal: What are your hopes for the future of survivor advocacy worldwide? Specifically, how do you envision a more supportive and just world for survivors from all backgrounds?
Dr. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale: This is a great question. Huge, right, but really important for us all to think about.
I really hope that we continue to see coalitions being built by survivors, particularly student survivors across national boundaries across universities. We're so fortunate, I think, in many ways that we live in this historical moment because technology can really facilitate this for us, so I hope we continue to see more of these survivors again across universities.
I also hope that more survivors globally are given the time and the space to tell their stories in the ways that they choose. They deserve and need to have control over their own narratives and how they're depicted to others.
I think that survivors can also help other survivors in key ways. We are seeing this now, but I hope to see more of it in the future by listening and sharing our experiences with one another and that book project—it's just one example of what I'm talking about there—but I think we also need to continue to educate people about sexual violence.
Many people cannot imagine that it will ever happen to them or someone they love, but as we know, it can, and it does, unfortunately, so educating people on the fact that, okay, maybe this hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, but there's probably somebody in that classroom along with you who's been through this. Education is really important that way.
I think that we need to work more and more to create cultural spaces around the world where survivors feel safe and supported, and certainly are not made to suffer further.
So, in my mind, it's pretty simple. We need to advocate, we need to educate, and we need to continue to find ways, interesting, unusual ways to unite our voices. And as I said before, sexual violence and talking about it and sharing our stories is something of a civic responsibility on some level, because this is not a private issue. When it's relegated to the private sphere alone, then we aren't able to make those connections between our stories and point to the ways in which this is an epidemic, and it's happening all the time. When we can connect our stories, something very different can happen. We need to unite our voices together.
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To learn more, read Dr. Gray-Rosendale’s biography College Girl: A Memoir. I would like to give my sincerest thanks to Dr. Gray-Rosendale for partaking in this interview.
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