What colleges still don’t understand about sexual assault

This essay discusses sexual violence.It wasn’t rape. But it wasn’t consensual. It wasn’t violent. But I was crying and told him to stop. He wasn’t a rapist. I knew him. I wasn’t a victim.I was at an overnight college debate tournament when I was raped and physically assaulted by a fellow debater. The next morning, I woke up in the hallway with no ID and no phone. Days later, no matter how hard I scrubbed, his smell lingered; no matter what I ate, my saliva tasted like his. For three years, I viewed what happened to me in that college dorm as just another ambiguous sexual encounter. We were intoxicated. I was initially attracted to him. And I was unsure what counted as “rape” on a college campus. The truth of the matter was that I knew what “real” rape was. I was raped at the age of nine, not by a stranger but by my neighbor, someone known to my family. There was no build-up, no seduction, just violence. The effect was a realization that the world, including my own street, was unsafe, and neither family nor friends could protect me. The culmination was an incapacity to tell. As a child, the words rape, sexual violence, and pedophilia were not a part of my vocabulary. I didn’t have the language to name what happened, and not naming it meant it didn’t happen. To cope, I became an avid reader. From elementary school onwards, I would read while walking, taking refuge in the study of language. This eventually led me to relearn my forgotten mother tongue, Japanese. In Japanese, I learned words to name unnameable phenomena in English, such as the word for snow falling or sunlight leaking through leaves. Studying Japanese was the safest way to expand my world with minimal risk, but it slowly became an act of empowerment. To name ambiguous phenomena, to eventually call it rape, to call it violence, to call it wrong. Sexual violence is distressingly common, but according to a 2016 meta-analysis by the NIH, over 60 percent of survivors don’t call their e