Katie Byron is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she served as a member of the Sexual Assault Task Force. She is on Twitter.

One-third of female students in my graduating class who responded to the Association of American Universities’ Campus Climate Survey reported being sexually assaulted during college. For these students, sexual violence isn’t a difficult conversation, it’s their life. They are constantly balancing their healing and their education, frequently while navigating a campus that they share with their assailant. It’s unreasonable to expect student survivors to leave their personal experiences at the classroom door. Trauma affects how students learn and academic discussions about trauma and violence should take this into consideration.

Students are not avoiding or silencing difficult conversations, they’re learning to face them in ways that are academically rigorous and sensitive to the needs of everyone in the room.

Promoting a rigorous academic environment does not mean making space for every idea that pops into a student’s head. Academic discussions make space in conversations to hear from people who have valuable knowledge to contribute. Safer learning environments ensure that students who have experienced violence are able to contribute without putting their experiences up for debate. More inclusive classrooms raise the level of discourse and nuance in academic conversations by promoting the free speech of student survivors, allowing others to learn from their experiences. Widespread campus sexual violence hurts entire campus communities and those communities should have an obligation to respond and support survivors in their healing and their learning.

There are those who think calling for safer academic environments is “coddling” or “infantilizing” to students. This view frames student survivors as weak and implies that when they receive support from their community, they are made weaker. Claiming that survivors of sexual violence are overly sensitive is a way of protecting other students from confronting difficult truths about the nature and prevalence of violence on their campuses. Classrooms and campuses that are sensitive to the needs of traumatized students provide opportunities for all students to engage with difficult material, not just those with the privilege of distancing themselves from the topic at hand.

Those who want to frame this issue as an attack on free speech on college campuses are ignoring the reality of campus sexual violence. Requests for safe spaces or trigger warnings are not about hiding from ideas but about finding ways to engage without disturbing the people most directly affected. Students are not avoiding or silencing difficult conversations, they’re learning to face them in ways that are both academically rigorous as well as sensitive to the needs of everyone in the room. Through these discussions, they are becoming a generation of leaders ready to create more inclusive and just world.



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