In Account blog
June 27, 2019
By Lisa Pierce, Stephanie Krehbiel and Hilary Jerome Scarsella
Several weeks ago, we published two narratives on our survivor story blog Our Stories Untold, both written by our Director of Theological Integrity Hilary Jerome Scarsella. In the first narrative, Hilary tells her experience of being raped in 2009 by a fellow student at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and the subsequent failure of the school to respond to that assault as a sexual assault. In the second narrative, Hilary describes the successful restitution process she went through with AMBS this year, a process made possible in large part because AMBS’s outgoing president, Sara Wenger Shenk, set the tone with her respectful and trauma-informed treatment of Hilary and of myself as Hilary’s advocate.
Many of you reading know just how rare this is. Higher education administrators are not, as a group, known for handing it well when survivors make demands. And to be clear: there are no just outcomes without demands. Hilary made demands; this was not a successful process because she was in any way compliant. Survivors frequently walk away from processes like these having been essentially branded as an enemy of the institution. That didn’t happen here, and it’s largely to Sara’s credit, because Sara demonstrated an understanding that restitution isn’t just window dressing.
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