I Was Part Of A Secret Society Of Jane Does At College. I’m Infuriated By How Little Has Changed Since Then

I can’t tell you her name, and I’m not even comfortable telling you her graduation year, because we took an oath.

“If you see each other in public, you can say hi, but you can never say where you know each other from,” our group leader told us on day one. “Pretend you’re in a class together if anyone asks.”

We were a secret society: the members of a rape survivors support group at Boston University. 

Despite that I was the second-youngest member, I was the group’s unofficial mom; my rape had happened the longest time ago, which meant I’d already been processing it for nine years. I knew survivor hacks. Laura – which isn’t her name – didn’t. 

She was the youngest. A blonde, Southern freshman who had been raped about 10 days before she found our group. It’s unusual for women to find their way to support groups in the immediate aftermath. She was raw.

Everyone else was somewhere in between. Only two of us had been randomly attacked by strange men. I was kidnapped from my room by a serial rapist when I was a child, and a grad student was raped out in an alley when she was a teenager. Laura was raped at the first frat party she attended. 

The rest were forms of date rape, a term I still hate because “date” makes it sound cute. Friendly. Lesser. But every one of us was working our way through symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: nightmares, hypervigilance, depersonalisation, insomnia.

Some tended more toward depression and some toward anger. Laura tended toward nothing whatsoever.

She didn’t speak much the first day she joined us. She sat quietly with us in that small room with the oval of chairs and told us her name and that she just wanted to listen, if that was all right. Of course it was.

But the second time she came, we all exchanged glances as soon as she walked in: her eyes were unfocused and her body was wobbly as she tried to navigate how to get into the chair – like it was confusing her how chairs worked. She looked drugged.

“You doing OK?” someone asked her, and she just stared straight ahead for a while, her body leaning a little crooked once she found her way into the seat.

“Laura?” someone asked.

Laura slowly turned her head and said, “What?”

“Are you OK? You look a little… tired.”

Catatonic, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. I’d just learned what the word meant in psychology class.

“Tired,” she repeated, and went back to staring straight ahead. Then, after an uncomfortable silence, she said in slow motion, “The doctor gave me medicine for anxiety. But I think...” Another uncomfortable silence. “I can’t think.”

How had she possibly gotten to this meeting? Found the building, walked up the stairs… how, when it seemed she was in no shape to be anywhere but safe in the concrete-blocked walls of her dorm room? I was amazed she even knew what time it was.

Afterward, we all walked out together, and she nearly went straight into oncoming traffic. Navigating Commonwealth Avenue in Boston is like playing Frogger: you pass through fast-walking pedestrians, then a bike lane, cars, the big green T tracks, and then must repeat it all backward to get to the other side. It’s not the place to be when you’re tranquilised. 

“I’ll get her home,” our curly-haired friend said, taking her by the hand. We took turns walking her places for the next couple of weeks. One of us had some classes with her, which was lucky. Another lived in her dorm.

I think she would have wandered off and ended up mangled on train tracks without another human’s hand tethering her to reality. Mix trauma with benzodiazepines and you get a soup of impaired decisions.

I can’t remember if she came off the medication or lowered the dose, but the haze slowly lifted, and we got to see more and more of her coming through. She had a boyfriend from home who had come to get her through this, but he was acting strange about it, she said. “Like maybe he blames me, just a little.”

Her mother wanted her to come home. She was trying so hard not to. But she hadn’t reported the rape yet, and she knew she could run into her rapist on campus at any time.

You can’t guilt someone into reporting it. You can encourage, but ultimately, it’s not an easy thing for a victim to do: not only are you sharing something deeply personal with people you don’t know, but you have no idea if they’ll believe you, no idea if the rapist or his friends will seek revenge, no idea if things will get flipped around and you’ll be the one ostracised.

And you’re still statistically unlikely to see justice. According To RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), fewer than 20% of sexual assault reports are criminally charged, and less than 8% of those lead to a conviction.

Even when you think there’s no possible way your story could be misconstrued – even then, people find a way. My rapist was caught, and the trial was all over the news while I was in junior high school. I took a class or two at the high school that year, and while I was in the bathroom, I heard two high school girls I’d never met discussing me at the sink.

“I heard she asked for it,” one of them said.

I was 10 when it happened. Asleep in my bed in a long, pink nightgown.

So all we could do was hope she’d find the nerve, because the thing everyone understands is that he’ll do it again. It’s not the victim’s fault or responsibility, and yet – he’ll do it again. It’s an awful position to be in, to have future women’s lives wrapped up in your willingness to disclose your trauma to strangers.

I didn’t know if Laura would get there. But one of the unspoken society rules was that we supported each other’s journeys, even when they were different from what we would choose.

The Clothesline Project came to campus that year. It’s a travelling exhibit that started in 1990 in Cape Cod to draw attention to violence against women. Abuse survivors and their loved ones are invited to write or draw on a T-shirt, with colours and sizes that represent different things: yellow for domestic violence and assault; red, pink and orange for rape and childhood sexual abuse; white for murder, and so on.

“Will you make one for me?” asked the grad student. “I don’t think I can handle seeing the project.”

I was an art major. I made her the prettiest shirt I could. “For a girl who fought back,” I wrote. Because she did.

I went with the angry girls. We wrote our messages in fabric markers on donated T-shirts, which the university hung right in the student union, in front of big windows with plenty of daylight. Every college campus is vulnerable to sexual assaults, but I still feel strongly that mine did its best by us in those days, swiftly expelling an offender I knew and giving us multiple ways to share our stories.

The messages were beautiful: “Hold onto hope. We will get through this,” and gutting: “Daddies should never.” “He is still a teacher.” Laura didn’t come with us, which maybe was for the best.

But one day, a fire began to emerge from our quiet friend. It was as if she had broken through the fog and become a thunderstorm on the other side.

“I’m staying,” she said. “And I’m pressing charges.”

Last I knew, her case was still winding through the court system when I graduated. This was a time before cell phones and social media, and we reminded each other of a painful time in our lives. But even though the other Jane Does and I didn’t stay connected, we were important to each other when it mattered. Many years later, I did find two of the secret society members online – they had become a teacher and a lawyer – but I never found Laura again. 

My mind often pauses on the memory of her. Her vulnerability, and ultimately, her bravery.

I see her in every Jane Doe story, because they are all her, and there are too many of them. The Chi Phi “brothers” are no different from the one who raped her, no different from Brock Turner, no different from all the men whose names we never learn because their cases don’t catch the media’s attention.

They wind up in positions of power and trust, while we question every encounter with a man for the rest of our lives. The news cycle will move on, colleges will send out press releases swearing they’re going to take this seriously, at least seriously enough to appease the donors.

And our secret society of Jane Does goes on, with the next young woman and the next adding their T-shirts to the clothesline. Counting on the women who came before to hold their hands, and show them the way home.

Jenna Brooks is the author or ghostwriter of more than 35 books for celebrities, doctors, athletes, college professors, and others. She writes for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Inc., AARP, Parents, Writer’s Digest, Business Insider and Healthline. 

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