We Are All Emily Doe

Floor Speech

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Ms. CLARK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New Hampshire for her personal story. It is moving, it is courageous, and it makes a difference. We so appreciate your words because your story is our story, and it is the story of our daughters, our nieces, our granddaughters, and ourselves.

Approximately 20 percent of women who go to college will be sexually assaulted, and according to the Department of Justice and the Center for Public Policy, 95 percent of those women will not report their crimes because they don't think they will be believed. They think they will be humiliated and shamed.

As Emily Doe said so eloquently and brutally frankly in her statement to her rapist Brock Turner, the judicial system and institutions will blame the victim. She had her consent questioned even though she was unconscious.

Another college student recently in the news in Massachusetts went to WPI, and when she was lured to a rooftop and raped by a university security guard, she was questioned in the courtroom on her so-called risky behavior of drinking alcohol, not getting off the elevator when the guard followed her on, and that she had ignored training on personal safety.

Recently at Harvard, an alumni group president of an elite men's club offered that the suggestion of making the club coed was not a good one because it would potentially increase sexual assault at the club, not decrease it.

Alcohol, trusting security guards, the mere presence of women, none of it justifies rape. Alcohol highlights the deeply rooted ideas of entitlement that we have, and in rapists--and in, too frequently, mass shooters--it is what Michael Kimmel terms ``aggrieved entitlement,'' a powerful toxic world view that justifies violent action against children, women, elderly, or the LGBTQ community because the perpetrator believes they can act with impunity.

So how do we begin to change this horrifying landscape? First, we need to collect data. We need to understand who is perpetrating these crimes to understand how we can get to better solutions. A lack of accurate capture and analysis for understanding perpetration has caused us to not be able to frame the questions for better solutions.

Second, we have to look at funding. Cuts to social services for domestic violence and sexual assault are ones that we simply can't afford in our very first line of defense and the funding that is so necessary to build communities. We also need to talk to our children about sexual assault. A No More study revealed 73 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 have never talked to them about sexual assault, domestic violence, or even alcohol. And we certainly aren't talking about double standards, power imbalances, bias, and bigotry.

Finally, we need to look at our institutions: higher education--our colleges and universities--community policing, and our criminal justice system. We must enable transparency and accountability and counteract our deep cultural questions and questioning and disbelief of victims and stereotypes that enable entitlements to flourish violently.

The work that Representative Kuster has called for tonight begins with us, and I thank her again for her leadership and her bravery and her friendship not just to me, but to all women.

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