STUDENT NARRATIVE: UNREPORTED

She did not feel comfortable approaching the administration about what happened to her, mostly because she didn’t want to live through it again. The assailant was someone whom the girl had known previously, and they shared a lot of mutual friends. The two of them talked frequently, but it was nothing serious.

One evening, she drank more than usual. While out with friends, she saw him, and he asked if she’d like to hang out later. Before she started drinking that night, she had told him that she did not want to do anything sexual. After attending a few parties, she lost track of her friends in Dana. On her way out, she ran into the male, and they went back to her room as planned.

On their way back to Roberts’ Row, the victim blacked out. The last thing she remembers is walking in front of Miller, and then she woke up in her bed. After finding three used condoms on the floor in the morning, she confronted him immediately. “I told you I didn’t want to do anything,” she said. He became defensive, saying, “I didn’t rape you.” The girl hadn’t even used the word rape. According to him, she had said that she wanted to have sex when they returned the night before.

For a long time, she knew that something about the incident wasn’t right, but she hesitated to call it “rape.” It wasn’t until the Take Back the Night event that she began to come to terms with the assault. She was very opposed to attending the event, and both she and her friends couldn’t understand why. A few days later, she confessed what had happened to her to a friend, and they worked through it together. Eventually, she gathered the courage to confront her attacker. “You need to know that wasn’t right,” she said. “You can’t do that to someone else.” He listened to what she had to say, but since then she has distanced herself from him. Now, she feels as though she’s lost that carefree feeling that she once associated with weekends. She pays attention to how much she’s drinking to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.

She was upset by some reactions she received when she shared her story. One of her friends told her that, because she was drunk, it was a drunk hook-up, and she couldn’t call it “rape.” “Stuff like this may happen all the time,” the victim said, “but that doesn’t make it right.”

STUDENT NARRATIVE: UNREPORTED

She refuses to call herself a victim—she says she hates that word. Instead, she is a survivor. She has survived multiple sexual assaults, which have set off a chain reaction of serious eating disorders and placed this student in the hospital for emergency surgery when her throat closed up from forcing herself to vomit.

In high school, she was in an abusive relationship. She consented to sex with her boyfriend, but she said he would force her to have sex with him even when she didn’t want to. “[Giving] consent once doesn’t mean you give consent for anything and everything,” she said. At the time, though, she wasn’t sure what was right or wrong.

Dating him cost her control of her body, and she tried to regain it through a very restrictive diet in which she would not eat any carbohydrates. These moments were the roots of her eating disorders, though she did not realize their connection until much later.

Two months into her first year at Colby, she was at an on-campus party, which she said was hosted by members of an alleged underground fraternity. She and her boyfriend had just broken up, and she was unsure of the social codes in a hookup situation on campus. That night, a male peer took advantage of her. “I ended up having sex with him,” she said. “But I never gave consent.”

“I didn’t tell anyone because I figured that this was part of the hookup culture, but I got very angry and kept it inside,” she said. After that experience, she began purging about once a week. She said that if given a map of Colby, she could point out every private bathroom on campus.

In the winter of that same year, she was in her bed, completely sober, and around 2 a.m. a drunken male entered her room and got into bed with her. It was an accident, she later learned, but “every fiber of my being was like ‘get the f*** out of my bed,’” she said. “So I started yelling and yelling.” Even so, it took some time for him to mobilize. She no longer felt safe in her own room.

“That’s when my eating disorder really accelerated,” she said. “I was like, throwing up after every single meal.”

A few months later, her bulimia landed her in the hospital for emergency surgery. Her throat had closed up, and she couldn’t breathe. She said she called for a “cease-fire” with her body and gave up purging. She did not get help, but she couldn’t keep throwing up—it could kill her.

The next year, she attended an off-campus party and was handed a glass of punch. About halfway into the drink, she started feeling very unsteady. A male student took the drink from her and told her not to drink any more punch. A couple of concerned peers sent her home. She was told later that some students had been slipping painkillers into the girls’ drinks at the party.

She started throwing up again.

With the love and support of a few close friends on campus, she pulled herself through the year. She had to drop an important class for her major because there was too much else going on at the time. She said she began going to counseling services at Colby but that it wasn’t terribly helpful.

It was only at Take Back the Night—an event dedicated to survivors of sexual assault—where she broke down crying and realized she, herself, was a survivor of sexual assault.

She is currently studying abroad and very happy to report that she has found a doctor overseas who is incredibly beneficial to her and is helping her to heal. With this doctor, she said that she’s finally been able to begin working through her eating disorder and her multiple sexual assaults—and the relationship between the two. She said she wishes that the College had provided more avenues of support and education for her and that it is shocking to her that she is getting the help she’s needed so far away from home.

“What Colby needs to do is give us a resource center with doctors who know what to do about this,” she said. “I didn’t report [my assaults] for two reasons. One, at the time, I didn’t know that anything was wrong, and two, I didn’t know who to report to….There’s no one approachable to report to,” she said. “Had I known how to and that what had happened was not OK, I would have reported.”

She said she feels the lack of a resource center and education on issues of sexual misconduct are an injustice to Colby students. “What scares me the most is that I don’t know if any of these people know what they’re doing is wrong,” she said.

STUDENT NARRATIVE: UNREPORTED

She met the student, an older, male athlete, in her first year at the college. After some kissing, he invited her back to his room, but she declined and went to find her friends. He was clearly annoyed, but she wasn’t interested in taking things further.

During the fall of her sophomore year, she encountered him again at Fall Ball. Once again, he asked her to come over, and she agreed, already having decided that she wouldn’t have sex with him. At this point, the girl had only had sex with one person, and she had never considered having sex with someone whom she wasn’t in love with. In his room, she willingly gave him oral sex. Then he started kissing her forcefully and pulling at her underwear beneath her dress. She explicitly said, “No, I don’t want to have sex,” but he ignored her. Using his strength against her, he forced her hands over her head and removed her underwear. “You owe me this after last year,” he said. Although she twisted her legs and tried to close herself off from him, he managed to force himself inside of her. The entire time, she was saying, loudly, “No, I don’t want to.”

The two students had been drinking that evening, and after he had been inside of her for a minute or so, he could no longer support himself. As he teetered over her, she managed to slip out from under him. She grabbed her dress and jacket from a chair, but he stood up before she could escape. “You can’t leave,” he said, physically blocking the door. She started sobbing, and he eventually let her go. She haphazardly put her dress on and left her bra and underwear behind. This incident went unreported.

STUDENT NARRATIVE: UNREPORTED

She didn’t know it was sexual assault at first, just that she didn’t like it and that it didn’t feel right. She had been drinking, too, and she had elected to go back to a stanger’s room. Before leaving, she said to him, explicitly, “Just so you know, I’m not having sex with you.”

It was fun at first, and it seemed that both the boy and the girl were enjoying themselves. They stripped down to nothing, and he indicated to her that he wanted her to perform oral sex on him. She said, “No, I don’t want to. I don’t even know you.” That did not stop the male athlete from continuing to ask and then pushing her head down to his groin. She kept stopping, pulling her head up and saying, “I don’t want to,” and he kept forcing her head down. In the process, he tried to enter her to have sex without permission and without a condom. She threw him off of her, asking if he was serious. She said later she realized how vulnerable she was in that situation, should he have chosen to ignore her yet again.

Eventually, he stopped forcing her head down, and then he ejaculated on her stomach. Though he invited her to stay the night, she declined and went home feeling dirty and used. Before going to bed, she showered and brushed her teeth several times. She still sees this student on campus, and they do not acknowledge each other. He appears not to recognize her, but she cannot forget his face.

STUDENT NARRATIVE: UNREPORTED

She met him at the beginning of their first year at Colby. They were in the same year, and through mutual friends they got to know each other well over time.

On a weekend night in the spring, the two ran into each other—he had just come back from a party with the rest of his athletic team, and she was upset over a fight with a friend.

She had always been attracted to him, and he was a popular athlete on campus, so she agreed to go back to his room for what she believed would be a simple make-out session. She had hooked up with other male athletes but had never had sex with any of them.

They were in his bed, just making out. She was on top of him wearing a skirt, and out of nowhere, he penetrated her—no permission was asked, no consent was given. She was sober enough to say no and fought him off, gathering her things and leaving his room as quickly as she could.

She didn’t tell many of her friends afterward, and when she did discuss it, she always ended the story with a small laugh, thinking that this sort of thing must happen all of the time.

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Editor’s note: The following stories are anonymous, and potentially identifying details have been obscured to help protect the identities of sexual assault survivors.