A Digital Archive of Feminist Activism at Middlebury College
This poster was distributed across the Middlebury campus to advertise for the upcoming demonstration to ban crisis pregnancy centers from the activities fair. It provides information for an organizing meeting a few days before the demonstration as well as the time of the demonstration itself.
Elissa Asch
Sep 14, 2022
Poster advertising a petition organized by Elissa Asch (2022.5) in an effort to ban CPCs from all colleges in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC).
Elissa Asch
Fall 2022
Series of “Vent Diagrams” created by Middlebury students on April 24, 2022 in advance of the main It Happens Here event on April 28. These are intended to highlight the overlap between two contradictory statements and challenge binary thinking.
Middlebury students
April 24, 2022
This interview contains three excerpts from a previous interview with Maddie Orcutt. These excerpts are labeled in the audio recording and transcription accordingly.
Maddie Orcutt
May 12, 2020
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Prompted by The Map Project, The Campus Editorial Board makes several recommendations regarding how to fight rape culture at Middlebury, including new in-person trainings, making reporting sexual assault easier, and changing party culture on campus. Here is the text from the article and a link to the posting.
Editorial Board
3/14/2019
By The Editorial Board
March 14, 2019 | 6:00am EDT
We would like to commend the Map Project created by It Happens Here (IHH) as a crucial step toward increased awareness of sexual assault and harassment on our campus. While the number of incidents represented on the map may come as no surprise to some students, the map is nonetheless an important call to rally the Middlebury community against rape culture. It also demonstrates a clear need for additional preventative measures to protect students from assault and harassment.
The concept for the Map Project is simple: an aerial view of Middlebury’s campus populated with a series of red dots, each one representing an instance of sexual assault or sexual harassment that has occurred on campus. To populate the map, students anonymously submitted data about instances of assault and harassment to IHH through a go-link posted last fall. By offering anonymity, IHH empowered survivors to share their experiences without losing their privacy or having to endure the process of formally reporting traumatic experiences.
The largest concentrations of red dots on the map appear in notoriously problematic buildings on campus, including Battell and Atwater Halls A and B, where athletic teams often host open parties. Since many parties on Middlebury’s campus are closed, Atwater parties are often the default social space for first-years who don’t have alternatives on weekend nights. It seems likely that the combination of an upperclassman living space and first-year partygoers contributes to a predatory sexual environment. Notably, the space with the second-largest number of red dots is Battell, a first-year dorm. This suggests that the online training intended to teach incoming students about consent and discourage them from committing sexual assault and harassment is not as successful as it ought to be in protecting first-years from assault and harassment by their peers.
Outside of residential and party spaces, even academic locations like Twilight and Axinn contain red dots, revealing just how pervasive sexual assault and harassment is at the college. If students are unable to occupy the spaces on campus that are explicitly devoted to education without fearing assault or harassment, then Middlebury is failing to fulfill its most basic purpose: to be an environment conducive to learning.
Currently, the majority of on-campus resources available to assault survivors are student-led, such as SPECS, MiddSafe, the SGA’s Sexual and Relationship Respect Committee (SRR) and IHH. While we commend these organizations for their work, we also recognize a clear need for additional administrative support to more effectively address the issue of campus-wide sexual misconduct.
We ask that the administration take the Map Project as evidence that the Green Dot sexual assault prevention program is limited in what it can accomplish. Although Green Dot’s bystander awareness training initiatives are an important first step, its organizers would likely be the first to admit that it does not change the culture at the heart of sexual assault and harassment. And the fact that the vast majority of the map’s dots appear in social spaces suggests that even when bystanders are present near instances of sexual assault, they do not reliably intervene. A real social shift needs to occur in order for cases of sexual assault and harassment to approach zero. Students may not always know which of their friends have sexually assaulted or harassed others, but many know which of their friends behave “badly” at parties or demonstrate unhealthy attitudes about sex and relationships behind closed doors. Those students are the ones most in need of productive conversations with their friends about consent and respect. Bystander intervention can help in potentially dangerous situations, but difficult conversations among friends — and the absolute social unacceptability of harassment and assault — will be required to end the minimization of consent and trivialization of assault and harassment that contribute to rape culture.
We recommend that the college implement a new anti-sexual assault training program that requires students to learn the nuances of sexual harassment and assault in-person rather than online. The current electronic educational program students undergo prior to their first year is too easy for a student to click through without internalizing its message.
As a more immediate measure, we also think the new program could place a greater emphasis on the punitive consequences of committing assault. Perhaps if more students understood and feared the disciplinary repercussions of sexual violations, the overall number of incidents would decrease, at least in the short term.
Of course, emphasizing the consequences of committing sexual assault or harassment will be meaningless if the college does not make the process of reporting less difficult. Some students who report their experiences of sexual assault become so overwhelmed or distraught during the process that they simply leave Middlebury. While we know there are no easy ways of changing this system, we know that the more intimidating this system is, the more difficult it will be for students to come forward.
We also recommend that the administration explore the option of updating the college’s weekend programming to provide students with additional options other than drinking. Middlebury’s isolated location means that weekend activities for students are quite limited, oftentimes encouraging a party culture based on binge drinking. Programs like the free Friday film are a good start, and we think additional programming on Friday and Saturday nights could give students alternatives to drinking heavily and heading to Atwater.
We would also like first-years to have more opportunities to host their own parties rather than constantly being shuffled into upperclassman environments. First-year students should have more room to party among themselves to properly acclimate to college rather than immediately jumping into older, potentially more dangerous settings.
The college has often prided itself on its relatively low number of sexual assault and harassment reports as documented in its annual safety reports. But these statistics are misleading — the majority of sexual assaults on this campus go entirely unreported, which means that even IHH’s Map Project is not a complete tally of on-campus sexual misconduct. We hope that IHH’s map has revealed the extent of on-campus misconduct to the Middlebury community, and that meaningful institutional and cultural progress follow as a result.
Link: https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/more-is-needed-to-combat-rape-culture/
The Campus covered the second rendition of The Map Project, which showed 108 “red dots” and was displayed in Davis Library. Several students spoke about their reactions and the urgency they felt about combatting sexual assault on campus. Here is the text from the article and a link to the posting.
Caroline Kapp
3/7/2019
By Caroline Kapp
March 7, 2019 | 6:00am EST
Red dots cover the map of Middlebury’s campus. Nine on Battell, four on Proctor and one each on Axinn, Twilight, Munroe and the Admissions Office. Each dot represents one person’s experience of sexual assault or harassment. There are 108 in total.
These instances were put on display in Davis Family Library last week as part of the Map Project, an initiative by It Happens Here (IHH). Students contributed to the map by anonymously submitting instances of sexual assault and harassment via a go-link last fall. Each incident was then demarcated by a red dot on the building in which it happened.
IHH is a group of student activists that raises awareness about sexual assault and works to support survivors in their healing. Its medium of choice is storytelling, and it allows survivors to remain anonymous. In doing so, IHH avoids many of the challenges that typically prevent survivors from coming forward.
This is the second rendition of the Map Project, which was first conducted in 2013.
“The Map is terrifying. It is heartbreaking,” read a description beside the Map.
Observers were invited to share their reactions on sticky notes displayed on an adjacent bulletin board. The reactions expressed sadness and consternation over the prevalence of sexual assault at Middlebury that the map revealed. They included:
“Disgusting.”
“Saddened and sickened that this happens at our college.”
“Looking at this map is really scary.”
“How does Midd let this happen???”
“Rape culture is real.”
“Rape culture is everywhere.”
“I think a lot about the strength the people who work closely with It Happens Here have because looking at this makes me panic but I know it’s important work.”
Last Friday, IHH leaders Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20 facilitated a conversation to discuss reactions to the Map, proposed Title IX reforms, how sexual assault is being enabled at Middlebury and what can be done to dismantle campus culture surrounding sexual assault.
To start the discussion, the students and faculty members in attendance introduced themselves and explained why they chose to attend the discussion.
“One of those dots is mine,” Vedock said.
Included in the conversation’s main themes was the air of complacency surrounding sexual assault on campus. Participants said they felt the school’s treatment of sexual assault is often reactionary, rather than proactive.
“The Map Project makes visible and undeniable a problem that is so often brushed aside by the people on campus who can choose not to see it,” Rebecca Wishnie ’20, who attended the discussion, said in a text message to The Campus.
Participants emphasized that students must do more to prevent sexual assault than putting Green Dot stickers on their water bottles or attending IHH. They also pointed out that sometimes perpetrators attend IHH, which does not absolve them of their actions.
“This map is a testament to the fact that Middlebury’s Green Dot training and other programs do not address the full scale and range of the problems of rape culture and sexual violence,” Wishnie said. She said that programs like these often center the problem around party culture and substance use.
“This logic perpetuates a culture that blames survivors for entering such spaces and neglects all of the other places and ways that rape culture manifests, rather than recognizing the cultural shift in which we must all participate in order to make this campus safer,” she said.
They also addressed issues with defining sexual assault, rape and consent. Many survivors struggle to determine whether their experiences “count” as assault, and students raised the possibility that some perpetrators may not be aware of what they did.
Some attendees were surprised by the frequency of sexual assaults shown on the map. Others were not.
“When I was putting the map together I was not surprised,” Shomo said. “This in some ways was the worst part.”
“For people that have been assaulted it’s not surprising,” Vedock said. “For people that know people that have been assaulted it’s not surprising. But if you don’t fall into either of those groups maybe it is surprising. In a very un-malicious way, I want people to not be able to unsee the map.”
They explained that most of the work being done on campus is by survivors themselves. Survivors are being forced to support themselves and each other with little assistance from the school.
“It’s a huge burden logistically and emotionally no matter who you are, but especially if the issue is personal,” Shomo said. Shomo and Vedock emphasized that it is important for people who are not survivors to get involved.
Their main message: students need to show up and people need to care, even if they have not been personally impacted by sexual assault.
“You should care because people are people, but you should also care because it’s your friends and your family members and your classmates,” Shomo said. Unless everyone commits to dismantling rape culture on campus, Vedock pointed out, the dots will not change.
The Map Project can be found at go/ihh/. This Spring It Happens Here will take place on April 18 at 8:00 p.m. in Wilson Hall.
Link: https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/map-project-marks-locations-of-108-campus-assaults/
IHH first conducted the “Map Project” in 2013. Students submitted locations on campus where they’ve experienced sexual assault or harassment, and IHH plotted corresponding red dots onto a map of campus, each one representing a student’s submission. The process was repeated in 2019, resulting in a new map.
IHH
2019
After an IHH organizer, Taite Shomo ‘20.5, had begun to advertise the go/link for students to submit locations on campus that they’d been sexually harassed or assaulted, she spoke to The Campus about the project’s history and goals. Here is the text from the article and a link to the posting.
Ben Dohan
11/1/2018
By Ben Dohan
November 1, 2018 | 5:58am EDT
Signs reading “go/mapproject” appeared across campus last week, advertising a link that leads to a form where respondents can identify where they have been sexually assaulted on campus.
The goal of the project is to visualize locations where sexual violence has occured on campus. It Happens Here (IHH) began the map project in 2012, placing a map with red dots paired with a selection of anonymous stories on display in the atrium of Davis Family Library.
Taite Shomo ’20.5, one of the organizers of IHH, led the effort to revive the map project this year.
“The reason we decided to bring the map project back now is because of all of the student activism on campus, as well as the activism around the country about sexual assault,” Shomo said. “I’ve also been looking for ways to make IHH larger than just a once-a-semester event, and this was one way to continue to raise awareness about sexual assault at Middlebury aside from the regular events.”
The map project reflects the reality that sexual assault remains a major problem at Middlebury. This reality is what drove the protest that took place at the Pather Day parade against Middlebury’s handling of sexual assault. One of the protestors at the Panther Day protest was holding the 2013 map.
“The map is powerful because it gives people a visual of how pervasive and prevalent sexual assault and harassment are on this campus,” Shomo said. Recent campus security reports have recorded no more than 25 reported instances of sexual violence per year — a figure that IHH organizers believe is in fact much higher.
“The objective is to get people to consider how much of a reality assault and harassment are here,” Shomo explained.
Annie Blalock ’20.5, president of Feminist Action at Middlebury (FAM), echoed the same sentiment.
“There’s that one story that you have in your head that you saw on the news, and then looking at a map like that, you think ‘that’s this one red dot here’ and then you’re like ‘oh, there’s hundreds of red dots, every one of those is a story like that,” Blalock said.
Although she is not involved with organizing the map project, Blalock is an enthusiastic supporter. IHH and FAM engage with many overlapping issues.
“There’s an obvious tie between feminism and raising awareness of sexual assault and holding perpetrators accountable,” Blalock said. “We are now living a culture where people who formerly were silenced by our society and the systems in place that silenced victims, are being given the space to speak out.”
In the original map project, which was completed in early 2013, most submitted sexual assaults occurred in party hotspots such as Atwater, social houses, KDR and Palmer, as well as other residence halls, especially underclassmen dorms. However, sexual violence can happen anywhere, as victims reported incidents in both the McCullough Student Center and the Freeman International Center as well.
“I think it’s an interesting perspective to gain,” said Blalock, reflecting on the benefit of locating the the incidents of sexual violence on a map. “Walking through a place like Allen and being like, ‘Someone was assaulted here.’”
According to Shomo, the map from this year will be formatted in the same manner as the previous map. However, Shomo added that organizers may need to make the map bigger because they are accepting reports of both sexual assault and harassment, whereas the 2013 map only dealt with sexual assaults.
“I would be surprised if we see any of the campus on the map, as opposed to it just being all red dots,” Blalock said.
The go/mapproject survey contains two questions. The first asks in which residence halls respondents have experienced sexual assault or harassment. The second asks in which other buildings, including dining halls and academic buildings, respondents have experienced sexual assault or harassment.
“Filling out that form itself could be empowering for people because they feel involved,” Blalock said.
She also believed that some people would still not feel comfortable submitting the form, although it is anonymous.
“Even with all the reports that this map project gets, it’s not going to be the whole number of assaults or reports of harassment.”
Between 2013 and 2015, some members of the college community were concerned that IHH’s events and advertising were triggering to students. Others were worried that the map project would stigmatize certain buildings on campus, but Shomo was not concerned about this.
“I think that the maps will show that sexual violence happens in so many of the buildings on campus that I’m not concerned about it sending a message that assault only happens in some spaces,” Shomo said.
In a 2013 Campus article on the map project, Luke Carrol-Brown ’13 responded to the criticism that the project stigmatized certain locations on campus.
“The Map Project has never been about identifying danger zones on campus,” he said. “That would stink of emphasizing victim responsibility instead of placing accountability where it should lie: in the hands of the individuals who perpetrate these crimes. The Map Project is about coming clean with a problem that so many of us deny or disregard, putting the human impact of this epidemic in visual form and driving empathy amongst survivors.”
In January 2014, The Campus published an editorial titled “It Happens Here: It’s Time to Evolve.” In it, the editorial board argued that the map, IHH events and signs reading “It Happens Here” could be powerful triggers that hurt survivors, and urges them to adjust their strategies.
Student organizers of IHH published an op-ed in January 2015 addressing the conversation surrounding the potential triggering effect of their work. They acknowledged that though “these criticisms weigh heavily in our minds,” “there must be spaces for survivors to share their stories if/when they’re ready,” and that “if we are to continue to hold these events, we will continue to need to advertise. In our minds, relegating survivors’ experiences to the margins of this campus has never been and will never be an option.
“We raise consciousness that It Happens Here in the hope that one day, It won’t.”
Blalock was concerned about the lack of institutional support for survivors of sexual violence at Middlebury, but saw the Map Project as a resource for students.
“This is as much a tool for survivors and victims of assault or violence or harassment because it could be cathartic, it could be building that community, it could be feeling like a part of something or feeling not alone, but I think it’s as much a resource for survivors and victims as it is for bystanders or people who have not had a situation like that,” Blalock said. “One survivor is not alone, they are one of many people that have been victims of perpetrated violence.”
The submission form will remain open until Nov. 16.
Link: https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/map-project-marks-locations-of-sexual-assault-on-campus/
This flier was created by Miranda-Max de Beer (Class of 2019) and Mika Morton (Class of 2019). It contains information about CPCs and the misinformation they spread. De Beer and Morton handed out this flier at the 2018 Student Activities Fair, which is an annual event in which student groups, as well as local organizations with an on-campus presence, advertise to students interested in getting involved. The local CPC has frequently held a booth to advertise at this event. In 2018, to protest the CPC’s presence on campus, de Beer and Morton intercepted people passing by the CPC’s booth and gave them this flier.
Miranda-Max de Beer and Mika Morton
Fall 2018
This is Study Breaks’ coverage of The List and its fallout.
Alex Johnson
February 14, 2018
By Alex Johnson, New York University
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
Elizabeth Dunn, a senior at Middlebury College in Vermont, faces disciplinary action for leaking a list of “men to avoid,” including 30 male students and their range of associated behaviors from “emotionally manipulative” to accusing them of rape.
According to The Middlebury Campus, Dunn claims she created the list of men to avoid based on the stories of 30–40 survivors, but they did not grant permission to Dunn to release the list.
Currently, she is charged with respect for persons because she violated the survivors’ privacy and the fact that the accused men to avoid are unable to defend themselves against the allegations. She also withheld information about the survivors to the judicial office in Middlebury, which makes the list more suspicious than it seems.
Middlebury is not the first college to have a sexual-assault scandalreach mainstream media; Yale and Columbia have had controversial incidences as well.
According to the Daily News, Yale was condemned for not expelling a student, despite the fact that he/she engaged in nonconsensual sex. In addition, a student at Columbia created a list of men to avoid in their bathroom, which included two male students who settled lawsuits with the university.
Bill Burger, a representative for Middlebury, made a comment to the college newspaper, saying, “Middlebury is committed to supporting survivors of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct and to reducing sexual violence in our community.”
Both the Middlebury Campus and the Daily News put forth a conversation into the larger #MeToo movement and how these events correlate. Within the #MeToo movement, a list similar to Dunn’s men-to-avoid catalog exists.
Called the Shitty Media Men list, the register, which was created by Moira Donegan, includes the names of more than 70 men in a Google spreadsheet. According to Vox, Donegan claimed she made the list so that others could see the incriminated men and add other names if they chose.
The Shitty Media Men list was supposed to be private, similar to the list of men to avoid by Dunn at Middlebury, but it became public after Donegan deleted it.
Dunn herself made a statement in regard to the list of men to avoid and the #MeToo movement: “This list could and should be contextualized as part of broader movements against sexual violence such as the shitty men in media list, the Me Too hashtag, and other forms of activism.”
For more about the #MeToo movement and how its affected colleges across the country, click here.
Link: https://studybreaks.com/news-politics/men-to-avoid-middlebury/
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