"Being Creepy Doesn't Count": How Operationalizing Institutional Language Delegitimizes Students' Experiences of Sexual Violence

• In Event: 77.032 - Rape Culture in Public Education and Online: Exploring Current Realities and Solutions

Abstract

As the #MeToo era has ushered in with it an increasing visibility of the subtle and cumulative aspects of sexual violence, this movement has also been subject to much criticism in line with “post-truth” politics. Whether deemed a “witch hunt” or condemned for conflating rape with bad dates, the critical discourse surrounding #MeToo and other movements like it (Smith, 2018; Tolentino, 2018), does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is reflective and representative of the various strategies employed to discredit and silence those who speak up in the wake of sexual violence. Contextualized within the university campus, those who speak up but do not use the right words (e.g. sexual harassment/assault) are subject to increased suspicion if they cannot, do not, or choose not to name their experience of sexual violence using institutional language. Because students are often associated with their academic identities, they are often assumed to participate in and employ an accepted, standard institutional lexicon. Yet, this assumption proves misguided given that students’ varying identities (as informed by race, gender, class, etc.) differently impact their experiences with institutions, including the university (Nichols, forthcoming). These encounters in turn shape students’ knowledge and use (or not) of institutional language—usually appearing in university policy documents, bylaws and codes of conduct (Nichols, forthcoming). In reality, students who qualify their experiences with a “creepy” professor as opposed to naming an experience as sexual harassment are subject to disproportionate scrutiny, their use of the term “creepy” being taken as evidence of no wrongdoing on the part of the accused or insufficient evidence expressed by the individual making the complaint.

Given the societal landscape in which rape culture continues to emerge, this presentation not only investigates how the use of colloquial phrasing to describe sexual violence is systematically discredited but also points out the value of this language—usually considered outside what is academically accepted and considered acceptable. Through analyzing contemporary social media accounts, I first examine the external factors that necessitate students to bury their feeling of discomfort and/or deny their intuitions regarding situations of sexual violence translating into situations or people being expressed as “creepy”. Drawing on in depth interviews and survey data with administrators and students, this qualitative inquiry also teases out why the term “creepy” and other colloquial phrasing to describe feelings around experiences of sexual violence are systematically discredited by those with the power to investigate said complaint. Consistent with AERA’s 2019 investigation into Education Research in a ‘Post-Truth’ Era, this presentation answers “whose truth matters” when it comes to students’ experiences of sexual violence as they understand them.

Author

• Sarah Lewington, McGill University