MAYA WEINSTEIN, WASHINGTON, DC: During my freshman year of college I was raped by another student. I think everyone who works at a university needs to be trained to respond appropriately in the aftermath of an assault. And I decided to start working with my university to encourage them to make changes to their policy and their procedures, and to talk to them about what I had experienced and why that was such a problem, and try to figure out how to make change together. They formed the Provost Committee on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, and so I served on that committee up until I graduated. I was the risk manager of my sorority that people could go to if they had experienced a sexual assault or knew that a sister had. I served as president of my sorority for my last year in college. I used my role as president to run a lot of programming talking about consent and what a healthy relationship looks like.
I was featured in the documentary The Hunting Ground, about sexual assault on college campuses, and the song was up for an Oscar nomination. So The Hunting Ground asked a bunch of survivors if we would be interested in joining Lady Gaga on stage during her performance. Walking out onto the stage and holding the hands of other survivors, I could really, really feel the power of the room and that this was going to be a huge moment for the sexual assault survivor movement. My hope is that people recognize that this is an issue, but that we can do something about it, so that no one is alone in their experience.
