It was my freshman year of high school when my Spanish teacher relayed a muddled statistic about violence against women through his still-prevalent accent. Having spoken Castellano his entire life, and grown up near what would later become my home city, Zaragoza, he lisped through the occasional “c” and “z” in English. I still remember his words the way match stick houses remember fire and the way my kitchen remembers the smell of apples and cinnamon in the morning. This moment lives on in my memory the way old photographs of my parents remember their wedding, with small glimpses of fate yet to pass, embroidered in an endless, 80s wedding gown. My Spanish teacher looked seriously at the soon to be women in the room and said “in college, one out of four teenage girls will be sexually assaulted”. It wasn’t the statistic at the time that resonated with me, more so the cavalier way my teacher then proceeded to turn to the girls in the room and count us off by fours, apparently attempting to drive home the reality that many of us had already lived through by the time we turned fifteen. My Spanish teacher passed over me and gave me slight, albeit sadistic relief as his finger pointed down the future of a girl next to me. Yet, as my fifteen-year-old thighs stuck uncomfortably to the plastic chair in that room, I looked at the other indignant girls and knew that we were all connected through the shared experience of helplessness. What I didn’t know at the time, was that before I would even reach college, I would become a “one in four”, a statistic with solidarity, and commonality in experience to other sexual abuse victims. I am positive that the numbers are higher than one in four, I would even go so far as to say that half to seventy-five percent of teenage girls will experience sexual abuse before entering university, and when verbal, sexual harassment is brought into the figures, I argue that they are raised to one hundred percent. Although the figures for male-targeted sexual and domestic abuse are rising, still they are disproportionate to the experience felt by women as they enter their adult years, beginning from the moment the changes in their body become obvious, and are nearly without end. It is my argument that if I were to have a conversation with every single girl, and many of the boys, entering NYU Shanghai’s class of 2018, they would share one thing: a story of how they were made to feel uncomfortable. Every incoming member of this class would be able to write about an experience in which their body was shoved underneath the overwhelming body of statistical information, when they were walking down the street and felt naked under the gaze of peer pressure, percentages, and when they, despite years of trained eloquence, would feel helpless against the polarizing lash of words that are designed to reprimand a woman, but “can be used to defame men, too”, like “slut”, or “whore”. Personally, I entered the incoming class of 2017, and before I had even been allowed to make mistakes, was assessed for my hemlines by people who later became my very close friends, and categorized into perceived promiscuity. The same way in which I have memorialized my Spanish teacher as the man who coolly counted me out, I remember another for their personal assessment that counted me in. A chilling experience which pushed me into a new and demoralizing world of my sexuality. I still hear it before I go to sleep at night. These words still echo in my eardrums like a metronome, reminding me of all of the reasons I have to be offended by the way in which we all treat each other. “I thought you would be totally easy when we first met… I don’t know, it was just how open you were, charismatic, and your skirts, man, they were really short, so…I was so surprised when I found out you didn’t want to have sex with me.” However, where we, as a college community, find reality is in the gray area. Sexuality is not as clear cut, and wants and desires are often ignored, or altered with the help of other substances. We may begin the night with a certain idea in our heads of how we would like it to end, and find ourselves five or six hours later completely disassembled by a set of events which we did not expect. Furthermore, although we may not think of ourselves as aggressors, as ones responsible for violating the boundaries of others often do not, at any one time it can become all too likely that this is a part of the gray area. Sexual assault does not just happen, we don’t slip into someone else and fumble around apologetically trying to make amends the way one does when sliding on a wet floor. Thankfully, despite not intending to begin as aggressors, every action taken that brings us in that direction is something we can amend and change in the moment to ensure that while a student may have felt sexually assaulted in the past, they do not on our campus. It is of critical importance that we evaluate ourselves and our actions to ensure safety and comfort in our community for anybody and everybody, all the while understanding that just the same way anybody can be a victim of such an unrelenting crime, so too can anybody be a perpetrator of sexual assault and violence. College seems like four years of total freedom, although in truth, it feels like four years of highs and lows so extreme, the middle ground can seem unreachable. As young people, we are often expected to do and to say what’s morally right, and what I’ve often found is that at nineteen, nobody is quite sure what that means yet. For some students, coming from diverse lands, family situations, and backgrounds, ideas about what constitutes sexuality, freedom and proper conduct differs greatly, but one thing we must strive to accept as a community is that verbal harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse of any kind is in no way acceptable in our lives, and in the lives of our friends, family members, and loved ones. This article was written by Natalie Soloperto. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch.