​Good Faith (noun): honesty or lawfulness of purpose 

 

Before I came to college, I couldn’t imagine where I’d be. I had this vivid daydream of going to parties, meeting people, and hopefully making friends that would last a lifetime. Most of that came true; I went to parties and formed strong bonds and connections with other students, some of those friends I’d made still in my life now. But I would’ve never believed you if you told me as an eighteen-year-old high school senior that in one year, I’d be testifying before university administrators to hold the man responsible for a violent, criminal act accountable for his actions. My name is Dawn Johnson and in October of 2022, I was drugged at a party while attending Penn State University.

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As is oftentimes believed to be the case when discussing power-based violence my perpetrator wasn’t a creepy guy lurking in an alley, he wasn’t already a sex-offender or registered criminal, and he wasn’t a stranger following me home after classes. He was the guy who always greeted me with a smile and a hug when we hung out, he was the guy who came to me for dating advice about women, he was the guy who walked me and my friends home after a night out to make sure we got there safely, and he was the first person I called when I won my first undergraduate research grant; he was my friend.
 

I’ll never forget the feeling my female friends and I had when we realized something had gone terribly wrong. It all happened so fast, within minutes of all three of us drinking from the same cup. I passed out numerous times and hit my head on his bathroom floor, one friend stopped breathing for a little while and was completely unresponsive, and the other was so disoriented she couldn’t stand up or stay awake. The feeling we had wasn’t the result of college drunkenness, it felt like my body was no longer mine. For all three of us, time felt like it had been torn apart and stitched together out of order—one of the few things I was told following the incident after expressing that I believed I was in the bathroom for a couple of minutes, was that I’d actually been passed out for numerous hours. The worst of it all, was the sobering discovery that while me and another young lady were incapacitated, the perpetrator had taken another girl affected and sexually-assaulted her in the next room. What happened that night has affected me in ways that will last the rest of my life, from the event itself to how the police department and the university handled it in the aftermath. We were consistently redirected by campus police. We were left to wonder in silence after reporting it to the State College police department for three months and only after many calls and a request to speak to a supervisor did we get any information about the progress of our report. During the institutional investigation, we were all made to relive the event repeatedly and the collective shame and embarrassment we felt having our characters picked apart hung over us for months like a sword just begging to pierce through our heads.
 

The anger and pain I felt being told by administrators before even recounting my story that the likelihood of the perpetrator facing any repercussions were slim was only amplified when he called me days after I made the report to apologize and confess, citing his reasoning for ripping apart our lives as being he’d seen it done by other young men at parties before and did not believe there would be any consequences because we were his friends, and he thought we wouldn’t remember anything at all. The emotionally jarring experience of seeing our perpetrator working in residential life after a six-month investigation deemed “inconclusive” only heightened the effects of what I’d experienced. It took a complaint with the campus police department and residential life leadership before they looked into his record and removed him from the position.
 

This piece was not written to call his character into question. It wasn’t written for sympathy or to start a public outrage against him or even Penn State University. This piece was written to start a conversation, and call into question the ethics of allowing a student who’d been put through an investigation for a violent crime the privilege of working in a job position where inherent power dynamics are at play and whether or not that precedent should be allowed to persist.
 

Penn State University is meant to be a microcosm of the real world. In the real world, the very nature of the legislation we enact into power is a direct reflection of what we as a society value and what—however implicit or explicit—we will tolerate in terms of behavior. To quote James Baldwin, “the law is meant to be my servant, not my master, my torturer, and my murderer.” The current imposed institutional policy on consequences for sexual and relationship violence make it abundantly clear what the university values and it is not the rights of the individuals most likely to be victimized by the devastating consequences of such a crime. “The law is meant to be my servant”; what does this mean? The law is meant to protect the rights and humane interests of an individual, in the same facet that institutional policy should exist to protect the individual rights and humane interests of the student body that governs and supports the university. I am proposing that there be a change in institutional policy that prohibits students that have been under investigation for violating the Penn State student code of conduct for engaging in acts of sexual violence or misconduct from working in residential life.
 

The Gender Equity Coalition calls it the Good Faith Clause. If adopted the prohibition would be able to be appealed and only enforced when there is a reasonable belief that the perpetrator being in a power-position would cause an abject disruption to the psychological or physical safety of the students as well as the victim-survivor. Its enforcement would not be an assignment of guilt but an acknowledgement of the victim-survivor’s trauma on the “good faith” that they’re telling the truth, even if the result of the investigation yields to be inconclusive.

 

Sexual violence is a structural problem not an interpersonal one, and the crime is inherently bound to the societally imposed components of discrimination. This proposition is not to condemn or assign fault to one demographic of people, but to open the door to a conversation about the future. A future in which a high-profile collegiate institution makes it clear through the execution of policy, that the fundamental rights of marginalized individuals will be protected because the consequences of violating such will be strict. And, that no member of such an organization has the right to exert power over another autonomous being, of which the very notion is condemned and justly intolerable. Our laws are a direct reflection of what we value, and a society or institution that continually condones, supports, and justifies power-based violence through the unchanging of crucial policy not only denotes one that lacks imagination, but also devalues the fundamental preservation of humanity.