Rendering the Personal Political

Searing. Piercing. Overwhelming. Lacerating. Triggering. These are just a few of the adjectives used to describe Suzie Miller’s one-woman play, Prima Facie, “a blistering indictment of the legal system” “that puts sexual assault jurisprudence on trial.”

Over 120 minutes, Prima Facie lays bare a series of “hard truths” about how the legal system handles sexual assault accusations, including the court’s single-minded focus on consent, credibility and personal responsibility that has the effect of minimizing, discrediting and deflecting the actual existential experience of sexual violation.

The play also explores a survivor’s ongoing experience of sexual violation and how sexual assault victims cope with repeated attacks on their epistemic authority.

The play stars Jodie Comer, the Killing Eve star making her first stage appearance, “astonishing, raw and unflinching,” delivering a nonstop, rapid-fire two-hour monologue that is, in turn, boastful, comic, heart-wrenching and ultimately electrifying.

She plays a high-powered barrister who earlier in her career had defended men accused of rape only to fall victim to a rape herself. She “knows she will have trouble proving” her accusations “to the law’s satisfaction”: “She was drunk; she had previously consented to have sex with the man; she couldn’t shout no because he covered her mouth to the point that she could hardly breathe.”

As her credibility is attacked in the name of “testing the case,”  she comes to realize that in the courtroom “finding truth, let alone justice, in such situations is all but impossible.”

I think it’s fair to say that today’s colleges treat sexual violence largely as a matter of legal liability. The primary objective is to protect institutions from the kinds of bad publicity and, especially, the financial costs, associated with sexual assault lawsuits.

Such suits have cost campuses millions of dollars. In 2022 alone, there were 69 publicly reported awards and settlements of $1 million or more. The University of California system reached two settlements totaling $615.6 million in response to the hundreds of patients who showed that they were sexually abused by a former UCLA gynecologist. The University of Michigan agreed to a $490 million settlement with 1,050 people who offered evidence that they were sexually assaulted by a former sports doctor at the institution. Meanwhile, Columbia University agreed to a $165 million settlement with 147 women who showed that a former gynecologist sexually abused them when he was their doctor.

I ask you: Shouldn’t colleges and universities do more to address sexual harassment and sexual violence than the kinds of training programs that currently prevail? If the answer is yes, then campuses need to bring the issues surrounding rape and sexual violation more squarely into the curriculum.

To that end, let me suggest a scholar whose work you ought to read.

Any serious understanding of sexual violence needs to engage with the extraordinarily powerful scholarship of the Panamanian-born philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff, who reminds us that serious attention to rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment, which dates from the 1980s, is not confined to the West, but has arisen in Argentina, Chile, India and elsewhere.

Across much of the world, we see survivors of sexual violence breaking silence, defying stigma, making public displays of defiance and solidarity, and engaging in social and legal activism. These efforts have had a tangible, if as yet insufficient, impact on reforming procedures of testimony, altering statutes of limitations and reshaping the public discourse.

“Unflinchingly personal,” Martín Alcoff’s book Rape and Resistance grapples with “some of the most perplexing questions about how to conceptualize the terrain of agency and violation.” It also shows “how episodes of sexual violence (or its threat or its aftermath) are interwoven with other dimensions of social power.”

The book serves to “complexify our understanding of what counts as sexual violence and move away from simplistic binary categories and simplistic claims that rape is about power but not sex.” As one commentator puts it, “There is less of a policing of rape, than of rape victims’ speech.”

Martín Alcoff makes several arguments that underscore philosophy’s relevance to the topic of sexual violence.

1. The problem of epistemic injustice. This is the issue of who is to be believed. As Martín Alcoff shows, there is a long tradition within Western culture, from Socrates onward, of questioning women’s credibility and veracity. There is a presumptive skepticism about women’s claims as somehow motivated by resentment or psychological instability or a desire for revenge or money.
2. Procedural inequities. Here, Martín Alcoff discusses the ways that the legal system assesses credibility. To ensure the plaintiff’s truthfulness and reliability, the legal system tends to focus on consent, consistencies in memory and the ability to recollect specific detail. But many victims and survivors, who underwent profound trauma, find it extraordinarily difficult to provide the level of detail that the legal system expects. Worse yet, legal procedures place the onus on women to prove their case by demonstrating resistance, immediately reporting the incident and breaking off all contact with their abuser.
3. The reinforcement of heterosexual norms. These include certain deeply embedded cultural assumptions: that men’s sexual needs are natural, that women bear responsibility for setting boundaries and policing men’s behavior, and that once sexual contact has begun, consent (and arousal) must be sustained.
4. The evasion of power relations. This is the tendency to downplay the importance of differentials in physical strength or status or economic standing in sexual assault cases that make it more difficult for the victim or survivor of abuse to act in ways that the legal system considers appropriate.

Martín Alcoff’s book raises profound questions about the dominant liberal discourse’s emphasis on consent as the primary way to assess personal responsibility. She quite rightly considers this as both experientially and existentially inadequate.

If the legal system too often proves unreliable and frequently fails to provide redress, it isn’t surprising that victims assert accountability in other ways: through anonymous accusations, anti–sexual violence protests and activism and public testimony. Is that enough? Of course not. But these steps do make the personal public.

The play Prima Facie and Martín Alcoff’s writings convey a visceral sense of the gravity of the impact of the victim’s experiences and its long-term effects on survivor’s life. As the playwright and the philosopher make clear, the personal costs of sexual victimization run extraordinarily high and include not only enduring psychological trauma, but in many cases, a loss of reputation, lost jobs and even the loss of child custody.

But, you might well ask, wouldn’t it be a mistake to integrate such topics into the curriculum? Wasn’t Columbia University right to delete Ovid’s Metamorphosis from its core curriculum on the grounds that the more than 50 instances of rape recounted in the volume only serve to re-traumatize students who have themselves experienced sexual violence?

Here, I can only say that evasion is a choice. Avoiding difficult topics or conversations doesn’t make pressing problems go away.

If campuses are to truly address sexual violence, more instructors need to place the voices and experiences of survivors front and center.

One instructor “had worries about assigning” Rape and Resistance to a college class, “given how directly it works through themes of traumatic experience and sexual agency.” But while that instructor didn’t “regret being cautious (and every group of students is different!), the majority of students were *relieved* to find such good critical tools for addressing experiences of assault, sexualized power and harassment—experiences that were already starkly familiar.”

Shouldn’t a college education confront today’s most urgent issues—including sexual violence, inequality and the ways that power differentials are rooted in language, law and public policy? I think so, and I hope you do, too.