City Councilor at-Large Ayanna Pressley revealed that she was raped as a college student during a Boston City Council meeting on Wednesday.
Though she did not specify where she went to college during the meeting, Pressley attended Boston University’s College of General Studies from 1992-94. She dropped out of the Metropolitan College in 1994 to take care of her mother, according to a profile of the councilor on the CGS website.
“I am a survivor of sexual assault while a college student,” Pressley said. “My truth is shared by 17.7 million American women and like 90 percent of those other survivors, I knew my attacker.”
Pressley called for support of an upcoming hearing to examine local college’s policies on preventing and dealing with sexual assaults.
The hearing, sponsored by Pressley and Councilor Felix Arroyo, is set for the end of April for National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
As chairwoman of the Committee on Women & Healthy Communities, Pressley has been focusing on women’s issues since her election to council in 2009.
In addition to sexual assault she has addressed issues such as child abuse and neglect, bullying, substance abuse, hunger and homelessness. She is running for re-election for her second at-large City Council term this fall.
“Like all survivors, I have been forced to deal with the feelings of shame, the below-the-surface emotional trauma and the memory of the social isolation in the aftermath of my sexual assault,” she said. “However, I feel it is my responsibility to speak up about this issue and give voice to the millions who suffer in silence.”
Sexual assault may be tolerated on campuses and according to the National Institute of Justice, college women are at higher risk for sexual assault than their non-college bound peers.
One out of five undergraduate woman experiences an attempted or successful sexual assault while in college, according to the NIJ. Ninety-five percent of these assaults go unreported to authorities.
“Culturally as a society we are too tolerant when it comes to sexual violence which is why it is referred to a crime of silence, because it often goes unreported,” Pressley said.
“Councilor Arroyo and I filed this hearing order not because we want to demonize our colleges and universities. But if sharing the details of my attack leads to colleges taking more comprehensive measures to further prevent sexual assaults on campus than we are all the better for it,” Pressley said.
Boston serves as a hub for more than 40 colleges and universities. However, these schools are not being held accountable for the logistics of sexual assaults on campuses, Arroyo said.
“Schools don’t want to be seen as ‘rape schools,’” he said. “They want to keep these numbers down and by doing so many incidents like this go unreported.”
Councilors will discuss ways to deal with sexual assault on campuses and possible ways to make college policies more transparent and preventative at the hearing in April.
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