CW: This piece contains depictions of sexual assault.
During my freshman year at my former undergraduate college, I went on a date with a leader in one of my university’s top Greek houses. We went back to my dorm where he placed a bottle of his alcohol out onto my unorganized desk table. He insisted I keep drinking while he refused to take a single sip. With each swig of the bottle, the room grew hazier as it became clearer to him that his ability to assert his power over me increased tenfold. I remembered him acting upon my drunken state, pushing me onto my bed, forcing my clothes off despite my pleas to stop. Pinned down, he continued to grope my body, the alcohol lost its haze and instead, my bloodstream became overrun with triggers of my childhood sexual assault traumas manifesting themselves again through this man’s hands. After my continuous acts of resistance, he shoved me onto the bed one last time with a heavier push, the tears in my eyes splattered onto my bed sheets by the force of the blow. He grabbed his things and left without saying a word.
My vulnerable naked body lay there, violated once again.
When I heard the recent sexual assault cases perpetuated by abusers from the Sigma Nu house at USC, and the long history of sexual assault on this campus, it brought back memories of that night when my body was pinned back and abused. I felt for those survivors and the pain they endured to retell their stories. That demoralizing feeling of demeaning yourself over your fear of speaking out feels just as painful as the visceral tears in my lungs that night crying out for help. Those tears and calls for help often feel like screaming into a void knowing that, despite studies showing that men in Greek life are three times more likely to rape, they are shielded as a historically protected group.
Even though this haunting pain has shadowed me for years, I still would never wish carceral systems like policing, prison time or capital punishment upon my past abusers and the abusers among us at USC.
My idea of justice for my own violated body and other survivors of sexual assault is cognizant of how these carceral systems have been positioned as saviors for years. From hearing survivor stories on campus to stories from my Indigenous elders reflecting on our tribe’s settler colonial times, I’ve understood that carceral systems and its actors never truly heal the community, but rather protect a few: white and upper-middle class folks. I opt instead for restorative justice, rather than what the USC community has shown in recent weeks; believing that sending their abusive students away is going to truly enact healing.
Protest signs and graffiti replaced the typical red solo cups on house lawns as each weekend students were mobilizing on Greek Row to demand justice beyond the superficial suspension placed on the Sigma Nu house. A common response I’ve noticed while browsing social media posts of these protests were misconceptions that placed carceral systems as something needed to obtain justice for sexual assault survivors — from phrases like “Suspension is not enough, rot in jail” to “The only Row you belong on is Death Row!”
After the murder of George Floyd, important conversations of police violence in the country followed. The desire to increase policing on Greek Row to protect women by throwing abusers in prisons or giving them the death penalty is violent because it’s an argument for “justice” dependent on systems historically abusive towards Black and brown communities.
“There were a lot of the calls for carceral punishment and arrests of [abusers] despite ‘ACAB’ being a buzzword last summer,” Grace Zhang, a second year studying law, history and culture and a member of USC Abolition, said. “Carceral systems will never solve any root issues or solve the violence in the first place. It will only rationalize mass incarceration and doesn’t center the survivor.”
Centering on carceral systems in the USC community raises questions on who our community is actually trying to obtain justice for, if not only for white upper-middle class women. If the goal is to alleviate the effects and instances of sexual abuse, using prisons as a punitive measure for justice doesn’t achieve that goal. If anything, it supports its growth.
Prisons, similar to Greek houses, have historically been a site of sexual assault. The US Department of Justice published data comparing sexual victimization in prisons between 2012 and 2015. The report found that numbers had nearly tripled in just three years, with 24,661 allegations of sexual victimization reported in 2015. Forty-two percent of the incidents were perpetrated by prison staff, highlighting the role of carceral actors in ongoing sexual violence.
The statistic are graver for transgender people in prisons. In a study sampling a random group of prisoners in California conducted by the University of California, Irvine, it was found that 59% of the transgender sample group in the study reported experiencing sexual assault, exemplifying the reality of gender disparities in prison sexual violence.
The numbers are of greater concern considering the stigma associated of sexual assault and the power dynamics of reporting your sexual violence within prisons that could leave many cases unreported.
The same stigmas and power dynamics can be found in frat houses on our campus, proving even more that an incestuous relationship exists between the violent carceral state and Greek life.
Ultimately, these calls for carceral punishment of abusers has no lasting impact because sexual assault is not an isolated issue within the university — it’s a systemic recurrence that has deep roots in the fabric of our nation’s history, and simply removing these abusers from our campus and placing them in other spaces does nothing to actually heal the issue or it’s victims.
“Disposing of them does not show a commitment to [advocating for survivors],” Jessica Hatrick, a doctoral student and member of USC Abolition, said. “It doesn’t create a rhetoric of how to prevent sexual violence on this campus. Sexual violence is systemic to society as well as the USC campus, so we need to be realistic about the fact that sexual violence happens, and we need to have systems in place that deal with it.”
The demands in the community to simply remove abusers from campus, wiping their hands clean from the issue, and the university’s lack of acknowledgement of what they’ve done — and haven’t done — to alleviate sexual violence on campus is a perfect depiction of white feminism.
“In the beginning, when protests started happening, a few of my femme of color friends went there and from that moment on we could tell that this was centered around white feminism and neo-liberal feminism,” Zhang said. “A lot of this is a result of people’s identities being upper-middle class white women and that it was mainly sorority girls being centered in this conversation with an erasure of non-Greek life people, people of color, queer people of color or non-binary people.”
When I saw that protest sign calling for the death penalty for abusers, I had that same concern. The efforts of these protestors trying to support bodily autonomy and protections against unethical violence are flawed if they’re calling for a punishment that has erased non-white people in conversation. Capital punishment rationalizes government sanctioned abuse and dominance over bodies that has been historically racially motivated.
“If we systemize punitivity that way, down the line it will affect Black and brown folks in particular,” Hatrick said. “Carceral feminism has a history of doing that, not thinking about who will be impacted as a result of these carceral systems.”
The Death Penalty Information Center provided a report in 2019 that showed the racism in the death penalty — half of the people who were sentenced to death that year were people of color. Further, from the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1977 up until that point, 308 Black people received death sentences in cases involving the death of white people. However, only 34 white people received death sentences in cases involving the death of Black people. Capital punishment is a fundamentally unethical and flawed system of government sanctioned violence that has disproportionately killed Black lives, and as a result, can never provide liberation or justice.
USC should take note of the universities across the country that are integrating more intentional systems into their spaces to combat carceral punitive measures. Brown University, for example, has initiated the Community Dialogue Project, inspired by transformative justice, that serves as “... a liberatory approach to violence …[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.” The project offers facilitated dialogue for harm reduction and even a full year apprenticeship program for undergrads to develop alternative community healing skills to become “Transformative Justice practitioners.”
USC has created the Community Advisory Board (CAB) program at USC, but fundamentally was critiqued by members of the community for its inability to commit to true transformative justice.
“There was never any serious engagement,” Hatrick said. “They would say ‘Black Lives Matter’ but then didn’t discuss getting rid of DPS… anyone who would attend the CAB meetings would know that they made it very clear at those meetings that abolition was not at the table.”
The values of Brown’s programming are reminders of what our university needs. As white students nowhere to be found on the streets last Summer hold poster boards today calling for carceral systems, we can see that performativity is among us, evoking and instigating that same abuse they’re claiming to fight against. Not being critical of this lack of foresight is simply treating the symptoms of our collective oppression, not the virus that plagues the liberation of us all.