Justine

“I know what I was in those days: unsteady, inconstant, a badly made bow. Every fault in me his raising laid bare. Every selfishness, every weakness.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Most schools fulfill this legal obligation by providing services that won’t involve a perpetrator, such as academic accommodations or healing resources. At Western University, victim advocates would broker agreements between survivors and their professors to get extensions on assignments or excused absences. They would also help survivors submit paperwork to receive refunds for classes they dropped or failed due to the strains of their traumatic symptoms. To improve survivors’ mental health, the Counseling Center hosted group therapy for sexual assault survivors and offered one-on-one counseling at a cheaper rate than the insurance co-pay at most private practices. Advocates also had a small fund available to cover survivors’ trauma-related expenses. Overwhelmingly, survivors who received these resources benefited from them. Some called them life-changing. However, few survivors felt comfortable actually using them. Especially more than once.”
― Nicole Bedera, On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence

“That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Ultimately, victim advocates were in a difficult position. They understood the betrayals of the Title IX system better than any other administrator on campus, but they lacked the power to change anything. Instead, they were witnesses to the same predictable horrors, tasked with performing a delicate balancing act: how do you warn a survivor about a system designed to betray them without discouraging them from using it?”
― Nicole Bedera, On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence