Most of the back to school safety campaigns focus on young children and teens, yet an estimated 1 in 5 women will get sexually assaulted during their college career. Adriana Medina, a Southern Illinois University student in Carbondale, IL was sexually assaulted on campus and unfortunately the school did absolutely nothing to protect her.
Medina uses poetry to tell her story, which all started when she went out drinking with a couple of friends. The turn of evens are a bit hazy, but all she remembers is waking up naked to a voice scolding her for vomiting in his apartment. She ran out of there as quickly as possible, wearing her blood-stained clothing from the night before.
Adriana Victoria Medina: I Need Answers from Karla Berry on Vimeo.
“The desk assistant should have been mandated to report it, I don’t understand why they didn’t stop me or asked me any questions or anything like that, they just let me go through. That’s not okay,” Adriana Medina tells HOY.
When she arrived to her dorm her roommate took her to the hospital to get checked out. “My initial reaction when I went to the hospital is that I didn’t want to press charges at all, I didn’t know who this kid was, maybe it was a mistake, maybe I just blacked out,” she says, “but when I got my rape kit done, they pulled out a tampon from up my cervix and that’s when I was upset.”
At that moment she decided to press charges, but unfortunately he was found not guilty. “The burden of proof couldn’t prove that he penetrated even though the bruises and abrasions already demonstrated that I couldn’t have pushed up a tampon and torn up my cervix,” Medina said in the video.
Not only did she suffer this traumatic experience, but the fact that the school didn’t do anything and she would be forced to see him all over campus added to her frustration. “I expressed to the school multiple times that I can’t eat at the dining hall because he works there [and so] I haven’t eaten there in months,” Medina told HOY.
The university did absolutely nothing to shield her from her attacker. “They don’t care. I asked them if I could get his schedule or could if he get switched to another dining hall on campus. I’m not asking him to lose his job or anything, but I need to be able to eat,” she said.
Unfortunately the university didn’t even help her get a legal advocate for her to make an appeal on their decision, so by the time she had one, it was too late. When word spread on campus, other women came forward about being assaulted by the same man.
“More women are getting hurt,” she explained, “I would have been over it if it was just me. I was coming to terms with it, I stopped going out. I figured out how to cope with it…and to find out another woman got hurt just broke my heart because I fought so hard for that not to happen.”
Fortunately the rapist was found guilty of sexually assaulting another student, but she continues to fight and speak about her experience to warn others about how easily they too can become victims.