A few years ago, two young women walked into my office.
Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino didn’t have an appointment. They didn’t have any fancy connections on Capitol Hill.
They had something far more powerful: the courage and conviction to share their stories.
Annie and Andrea were both sexually assaulted while students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When they reported the assaults, the school they loved – the school they trusted to protect its students – turned its back on them.
Annie remembers being told to think of her assault like a football game. She was told to imagine herself as the Monday-morning quarterback, to look back on her assault and consider what she could have done differently.
What she could have done differently.
It is outrageous that colleges and universities place the blame on survivors of sexual assault. It is absurd, it is so wrong, that financial and reputational incentives encourage colleges and universities to sweep assaults under the rug rather than address them. What does that say about how our society values women, how it values young people?
Two years ago, in partnership with Sen. Claire McCaskill and with the help of Annie, Andrea and other brave survivors and advocates, I introduced the bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act to hold colleges and universities accountable and provide better support for survivors.
We owe survivors a vote on this bill. And to fulfill that promise, I have joined with a group of survivors, political allies and survivor advocates to demand Congress give us the vote these brave young people deserve.
Will you help me? We can get Congress to act with a groundswell of outside pressure, and I am counting on you to be a part of it.
Together Annie and Andrea have helped many other sexual assault survivors file dozens of federal Title IX complaints in response to how their schools mishandled their sexual assault claims.
These young women are changing lives. They are helping their peers find justice, and I am doing everything in my power to help them. Today that means asking you to be allies in their fight.
Let’s sound our voices as one until Congress does the right thing. These women deserve a vote. All survivors do. Help me see they get it:
Join with Annie, Andrea and other allies to demand Congress vote to end campus sexual assault.
It’s not acceptable that assaults can be swept under the rug to preserve universities’ reputations or statistics. Survivors are more important.
Thank you,
Kirsten [Gillibrand]