Wednesday, April 13, 2016 // The Statement
11B
O
ver her time on campus, LSA senior Fabiana Diaz has
realized the necessity of advocating to prevent sexual
assault, even if she herself isn't fully healed.
“It is a privilege to be able to talk about [sexual assault] and
advocate for it, because not everyone has that opportunity,
but at the same time sometimes it can be tiring mentally,”
Diaz said. “Just because I’m advocating for something doesn’t
mean I’m completely 100 percent healed. There are moments
where I still feel like a victim. There are moments where I
still feel like I need support. But it’s hard because there’s like
people coming to you for support — you have to learn to bal-
ance it.”
On her second night campus, while at the summer Bridge
program, she was raped, Diaz said.
“I was so alone," she said. "I was coming here and I didn’t
know anybody, and because I was in the Bridge program, so
everybody knew something had happened. People talk.”
She said was told if she took her case to court her assail-
ant would not be prosecuted against, and the process of going
through questioning would be more draining on her. Diaz,
who was beginning her freshman year on campus — adjust-
ing to college can already be hard, but the experience made it
even more isolating.
“I had just started. I just started school,” Diaz said. “I was
missing class all of the time being called in for questioning —
whatever it was, it was exhausting. It was a very exhausting
process, and that just makes it harder. Who would want to go
through that? I would not want to go through that again.”
She said she had been assured she would not see her assail-
ant in her dorm or classes, but on her first day of class, he was
there.
Diaz said she stayed quiet about her experience for a long
time, and it was not until her junior year when the “Carry The
Weight” march happened on campus she felt comfortable
speaking out and joining the movement. She began volunteer-
ing at Sexual Assualt Prevention and Awareness Center after
the march and being open about what happened to her.
“I think that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone: It wasn’t just
happening to me,” Diaz said. “It was kind of silent on campus;
I didn’t really know any other survivors at all actually.”
Later that year when “The Hunting Ground” — a documen-
tary on campus sexual assault — was screened at the Michi-
gan Theater, she met activists Andrea Pino and Annie Clark
who were both survivors of rape while at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and are the primary subjects
of the film.
Through Pino and Clark, Diaz was invited to stand onstage
at the Oscars with Lady Gaga and other victims of sexual
assault. Diaz said the experience was amazing and marked
the first time she was surrounded by so many survivors,
but after she needed to remind people of the reason she was
there. After receiving many texts from people saying she was
“lucky” for the experience and wishing they were her, Diaz
felt compelled to write a piece on the reality of her situation.
“It was very cathartic to write about that, but it was also
hard because I don’t want people to think I’m not apprecia-
tive of them,” she said. “I just wanted them to further under-
stand I’m not lucky. I’m not lucky for this opportunity. People
weren’t understanding, like ‘I’m so jealous’ well, I’ll give it to
you. I don’t want to be at the Oscars for this reason.”
Being open about being a survivor is often a catch-22 for
Diaz. In some ways it has been a positive experience which
has altered the course of her life — she now wants to continue
activism after graduation — but she does not want people to
see it as her defining quality.
“People would say: ‘I’m so proud of you.’ They are. I under-
stand why people can be proud of me,” Diaz said. “Why I
decided to write the article is because I don’t want to be
proud, and I don’t want other people to be proud of me, for
what someone else did to my body. I don’t want that to be the
defining factor; I know that’s not how people see it, but some-
times it’s hard to be the face for this movement because I’m so
much more than my identity as a survivor.”
Continuing to work with Pino and Clark, Diaz has con-
tributed to writing a book titled “We Believe You: Survivors
of Sexual Assault” which came out on April 12. In it, she and
35 other survivors share their story of sexual assault on cam-
pus. Diaz said she wished she had a book like this when she
was assaulted — seeing it at SAPAC or coming across it in the
library, Diaz said, would have helped her feel less alone.
Being one of the faces of the sexual assault prevention
movement is difficult for Diaz at times, but she said it’s neces-
sary.
“It’s hard, but it has to be done,” Diaz said. “It’s hard to
sometimes be the voice because you don’t want to speak for
everyone. Survivorhood isn’t just like one all-encompassing
thing: It’s different for everyone. Everyone has their own
personal story, their own personal narrative. There might be
commonalities in the sense that, yeah, our schools are betray-
ing us — there are 160 schools under federal investigation for
potentially violating Title IX — that’s a national narrative
that’s happening, but at the same time, our traumas are dif-
ferent, and our traumas don’t define us either.”
FABIANA DIAZ
B Y E M M A K I N E R Y,
D A I LY N E W S E D I T O R
MATT VAILLIENCOURT / Daily