I’ve been thinking a lot about safe spaces lately. It’s been over three years since my sexual assault – I’m a second semester senior and I was raped during my first semester here at Tufts. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to terms with the impact it had on me – the ways in which it shaped my relationships with friends and family, the time it took to repair and heal and understand and grow – but I still grapple with the concept of location.
I was raped in the Rainbow House, at a party for queer women. My friends weren’t with me, but I felt safe. I could be drunk and high and young and naïve and still be safe at the Rainbow House – because it was a safe space! And somehow I was failed by the safe space. Dozens of my peers watched me be dragged out of the living room. One of my peers unlocked his bedroom door for my rapist, so that she could rape me in his bed.
I think that people know, at least on a surface level, how others feel when they have been raped. I think that people know that women can be rapists, and that power dynamics and issues of masculinity can still exist in queer sexual assault. But I think there’s still a lack of understanding of how to make a place safe. Frats can line basement walls with as many kids in bright green t-shirts as they want; faculty can throw a sticker above their desks. But that doesn’t create a culture of safety.
When I talk to queer freshmen now, I hear them talk about Rainbow House parties as a potential refuge from the rest of the Tufts party scene, as a space where they won’t be questioned about their sexuality and where, finally, they may be visible. I feel conflicted – I want to preserve this. I want them to get out of the Rainbow House and Tufts’ queer population what I was never able to get. But I also want to give them a tour of my rape – show them where my rapist served me a drink, where she asked me my name, which door she closed behind us, which bed she raped me in. Because – who knows? Maybe I wasn’t the first or last to believe in a safe space and have it be ruined. Maybe by speaking out, I can remind people that spaces are not safe by name, but by constant effort.