Opinion: Now is not the time to remain silent on social justice

In the rare moments when we are willing to imagine sexual assault, we picture dark corners, secluded alleyways and silence. Indeed, that silence makes sense; victims are often incapacitated and, more important, never break the silence with consent.

Silence pervades conversations about sexual assault. At the rare moments when these conversations enter the public sphere, they are shrouded in innuendos. This happens both for survivors, when their cases are dropped or their rape kits lay untested and when their supposed allies remain silent.

A silent student section at a football game and a silent protest surrounding Kenan Memorial Stadium would render the banal horrors of the corrupt athletic-donor complex in plain sight.

Moments like this would take the imagined dark corners, secluded alleyways and silence, and make them unavoidable.

At its core, silence is a political instrument.

American democracy’s guarantee of public forums and self-expression presumes an individual is able to speak, comfortable enough to raise a concern, and composed enough to articulate this concern rationally.

In the breaks from rationality, the emotional ruptures where the pain is too much to bear, speech is deemed invalid.

Charlotte’s protests, filled with anguish, fail to meet the preconditions of U.S. democracy, rendering the protesters’ speech unintelligible. Their voices are silenced through the mainstream’s inability to listen.

The politics of silence articulates itself differently for sexual assault survivors. When institutions stop pursuing cases, they suppress victims’ voices. When committees and courts mishandle victims’ testimonies, they strip survivors of their words, denying the shared experience of a growing cast of survivors. Police and schools’ failure to pursue these cases stifles survivors’ voices and delegitimizes their experiences.

The bind is therefore to demand that these people speak — an already arduous burden given that the act requires survivors to recount and relive their experience — and then to ignore them when they do.

The silence is not an inherent characteristic of American society, it is an imposition, a command emanating from institutions: “Stay quiet, we have no interest in listening.”

Trapped by a system that doesn’t care, survivors try other avenues through which to seek justice and even just speak. The Standing with Survivors Rally earlier in September attempted to provide that platform.

By allowing survivors to share their experiences, the protests showed solidarity with Delaney Robinson. But they also revealed one of the huge gaps in sexual assault advocacy. While the protest was large, very few men showed up. While men do face sexual assault, the vast majority of cases are reported by women. Men should stand with women to decry sexual violence.

The imposition of silence can only be deconstructed through collective efforts. Spaces are being built to give voices to those whom the system has failed, but these spaces will not last without a network of care.

A protest is a momentary rupture where the silenced speak out. A movement is a sustained rupture, the constant regeneration of the space such that the silenced are always offered the opportunity to speak out.

To build a movement, we must join the struggle.

For protests to transcend a moment of rupture, a network of allies of all genders must surface to work together to build a movement. It is the only way to end the regime of silence and ensure a campus and country where free speech extends to those who have been told to keep silent.