Ray Epstein was a 13-year-old living in Washington, D.C. when she had her first boyfriend, and he abused her. Epstein did exactly as she was taught. The eighth grader told a trusted adult, her head of school. The outcome was the opposite of what she expected.

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Instead of understanding and support, she faced disbelief and bullying. One fellow student crossed her name off of their class t-shirt. Administrators urged her to skip graduation, saying, she recalls, her presence would “cause too much drama.”

Epstein finished the rest of middle school from home. But it wasn’t a lost year. Home schooling gave Epstein the time to intern with Break the Cycle, a teen dating violence awareness organization, where she felt believed, validated — seen.

“Having people around me to tell me that I wasn’t alone was life-saving,” she says. “That was life-saving care.”

After graduating high school in 2021, she moved to Philadelphia to attend Temple University. There, she reestablished the then-defunct Student Activists Against Sexual Assault (SAASA) and worked to bring attention to college sexual assault culture. Today, the Temple grad travels to schools and universities around the country educating students on consent and healthy relations with What They Don’t Say (WTDS) and I Have the Right To. Lately, amid the very public reexamination of a 2024 Cornell alleged sexual assault case, she’s busier than ever, working to offer that same life-saving, but also assault-preventing, care to students across the country.

The Citizen sat down with Epstein to discuss how we can better protect, and educate, our students.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gianna Voges: Can you talk a little about your experience at Temple starting SAASA, and what the relationship between the student body and the organization was?

Ray Epstein: When I got to college, I was planning on not telling one single person that I was sexually assaulted. But, I thought that I would find some sort of outlet here in the same way as when I was working at Break the Cycle. I looked on [Temple’s] website to see if there was any sexual assault advocacy groups, and SAASA was listed as active. I remember very strategically breaking off from my roommate at the club fair to do a lap to look for “lacrosse.” I just kept doing laps and it wasn’t there.

This question was sitting inside of me, a fork in the road. Do I risk being that person again who was associated with sexual assault — when in my past, it was such a public, negative perception that was life-ruining for me — so that somebody else can find support and solace? Or, do I let this fester inside, not have my own outlet, and not risk that retaliation again? The answer was really obvious once I put it into that context.

SAASA was a really beautiful small group at first. The credit goes to the people who went to those meetings and then had conversations about what they learned and contributed to all the ripples that we know come from conversations around taboo topics. I felt like I witnessed a cultural change over the years that I was at Temple.

Can you give an example of this change?

The first time I worked with a fraternity’s pledge class, they had a lot of questions about things that I maybe wouldn’t expect them to ask about, which is good to ask. And then the second time, they had less questions and more answers. And the third time, they knew everything.

Describe the workshops you host with WTDS and I Have the Right To.

It totally depends on the audience, it’s pretty a la carte. Our interns are often coming from schools that we’re involved in at I Have the Right To, so we’ll have conversations with them about what the climate is before we go in, and with administrators, and figure out what we need to address.

We typically will meet with the fraternity, the school, the parents, whoever will meet with us or whoever we’re going to be addressing. We’ll have anonymous or private confidential conversations with them about what behaviours they’re observing. So, if maybe there’s a maturity difference in grades, and there’s a lot of jokes being made, versus sometimes it’s more physical what they want to address. We’ll change scenarios, we’ll change up what we’re addressing.

For fraternities, it’s very focused on aspirational masculinity, which has been a recent popularized reframe of toxic masculinity. Aspirational masculinity is framed as: We’ve been taught these behaviors our entire lives, and culturally it’s been reinforced to perform in a way that is harmful. How can I aspire to be a better man?

Especially when we’re working with fraternities through WTDS, there’s an inherent barrier in our gender dynamics too. Shannon [Porter, founder of WTDS] and I are very feminine presenting women who have experienced sexual assault. Often, fraternity men are labeled as perpetrators, or as aiding and abetting perpetrators.

So, the first thing, we acknowledge that difference. And we acknowledge that even though she and I spend 90 percent of our days talking, writing, emailing about sexual assault, it’s still uncomfortable. I still feel like a pit in my stomach when I say the words. We tell them, “If you’re uncomfortable, if you’re gonna laugh, that’s fine.” We laugh when we’re uncomfortable. We talk about sex so openly, and sex is funny.

Another term that is somewhat new to these discussions is “upstander.” What does it mean?

Being an upstander means that you have the appropriate tools and skills to intervene when you see something, whether it’s a harmful joke or an actual instance of sexual violence happening right in front of you. There are many reasons why we don’t intervene, and there’s a lot of shame about why people don’t intervene when it is legitimately an automatic fear response.

But if we’re prepared, and we have a toolkit and a set of scripts on how we can intervene and what feels comfortable to us, then we can kind of combat that freeze effect before it even happens. The reason we freeze is we don’t know what to do. It’s as automatic as if you put your hand to a hot stove and you flinch back.

What about the “Red Zone?” Why do more sexual assaults happen at the start of the school year, and what can be done about them?

There’s a few things that have to do with it. I think what is responsible is that people — and it’s mostly freshmen and sophomores or transfers that are most vulnerable — when they move onto campus are in a really new place with different baselines than each other.

We talk about this a lot when we talk to high school seniors. If you grew up in New York City, for example, you probably don’t know how to drive. You go to school in the suburbs or in a rural area, and you don’t know how to get around; you have to rely on other people.

And there’s a sense of familiarity that you get when you are part of a community. Group identity is something that we know a lot about sociologically. When you’re wearing the same logo or when you’re on a dating app and you see that you go to the same school, a stranger feels like a safer person. But in reality, they’re still a stranger. There is an inherent trust that is not fairly attributed to our peers on campus, and I think it’s that trust that is violated and abused.

What does reporting sexual assault look like now on college campuses — and is it an accurate measure of safety?

Title IX has been where people were supposed to go. It’s a university’s hub on campus where students can report sexual violence and access resources as they need them through the reporting process, which can be very extensive.

But because it’s underneath the Department of Education, Title IX is being completely dismantled. The amount of hubs for the Department of Education and the staff that are supposed to be reviewing these cases has been cut in more than half. We’re living in a new wild west where, even though legally you’re supposed to be compliant with all of the procedures and with supporting survivors in whatever way is mandated, there is no one there to reinforce it.

You can get away with a whole lot now. And before, when you couldn’t get away with as much, people still got away with a lot.

Then there’s the Clery Act, a crime report log that happens every two years to every single university and shows on and off campus reports of sexual violence and other crimes. Qualifying incidents have to go through quite a bit of screening in a way or pass a couple of rounds for them to qualify as reported.

It’s never representative of prevalence, but [these numbers are] often treated as representative of prevalence because it’s one of our only measurements. We know some schools are under-reporting and hiding those numbers. Liberty University [the Virginia university founded by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell] received a historic fine from the Department of Education right before they kind of transitioned into this new era for under-reporting.

But, universities who are accurately reporting instances of sexual assault universities, their number would be disproportionately high to what the entire country has. If parents are looking at Clery Data, which often comes up when you search student safety statistics, and not climate survey data, they’re going to think that their kid isn’t safe there and that that school has a particular rape problem.

Instead, that school is the place that’s actually being transparent and probably safest for your child. Because no matter where you go, you are at the exact same amount of risk. It’s just whether you’re able to get help or be taken seriously.

What is something that surprises people about sexual assault?

I wish more people knew about fear responses, because I think they explain a lot of how rape and sexual assault occur. There are five fear responses that we know. Fight or flight are the very typical ones. Then we have fawn, which means exactly what it sounds like: When you start doting over someone so that it ends faster in a sexual assault situation. People sometimes get lubricated when they are experiencing a sexual violation, and that is actually the body’s physical response to reduce pain.

We also have freeze, which is where the body essentially goes offline and stiffens. It’s your muscles tightening to prevent harm from happening, trying to play dead almost. Then we have flop, where your body goes completely limp. It’s kind of a playing dead mechanism, but in a very different looking way.

I wish people were taught that these mechanisms exist because they are automatic. Sometimes it’s not even in response to you. It can be completely consensual at first. Maybe they’ve had an experience in the past or maybe it’s their first experience and they start having that fear response. That’s a sign to check in because there needs to be enthusiastic consent for you to proceed. If someone is freezing or just laying there, that’s an opportunity to make sure that they’re still enthusiastic.

Do you think the Cornell case will change anything on the campuses where you work? What needs to change so that this cycle doesn’t repeat itself every few years?

I think we’re on the precipice of a social reckoning. I am excited, and I’m cautious, and I’m sad that someone has to be a martyr for things like this to happen because someone’s story should be theirs to decide what to do with. And this is probably not, I would assume, what this person wanted. Having all of this critique and judgment is such a horrifying experience.

I really hope students hold their colleges accountable. I hope alumni decide to write a letter to their university and ask for a breakdown of how they handle sexual assault cases. I hope that if you receive a bland response or something that sounds like PR from your college, or if they post a statement that is not specific, you’ll stop donating until you hear otherwise.

Everyone has power right now. The Cornell case was reopened. That is virtually unprecedented. Especially if you are a trustee, if you are a donor, if you even contribute to scholarships, you control everything at that school. If you stop contributing until things change, you are making the university have to rethink the way that it addresses things. I believe that if you donate to your university, you have a responsibility right now to investigate the way that they handle things because I promise you it’s not well right now.

How do we support survivors of rape and sexual assault?

There’s a study that I love that talks about both post-traumatic stress disorder as an injury and reframing it as a brain injury. It alters the chemistry of your brain and of your nervous system. The vagus nerve is turned online completely by PTSD, which is not how a reset human body functions. People respond differently, they react differently, they have urges of anger. Knowing those things is important. Treating it as an injury is important.

There are also studies that show the way you respond when someone discloses that they’ve been assaulted in the immediate aftermath is an immense predictor of whether or not they develop a lifetime of PTSD. I like to say to everyone: You have a superpower. It sounds like a lot of responsibility to respond in the right way, but really you only have to do a few things, which is to validate them, set a baseline of belief, because in this society, someone will disbelieve them and they will always go back to the first thing that they hear. It is really an individual power that is so strong and incredible and inspiring that just with a few words, you can save someone’s life.

SUPPORTING SURVIVORS