Where there can not be justice, there is sometimes clarity, and this is its own mercy.

 Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford (7/7/20) is a memoir involving a sexual assault the author suffered at St. Paul’s boarding school from male students. It describes how the assault and subsequent silencing affected her life, about later developments when many other former students came forward and charges were brought against the school, and her journey of coming to terms with the harm she suffered culminating in her writing the book. I listened to the Audible edition (11hrs 15min) which Crawford narrates.

Author Lacy Crawford was raised in Lake Forest, IL, an area I know well having lived in the adjacent community Lake Bluff at the same time she was away at boarding school and later Princeton. “Crawford attended St. Paul's School where she was raped by two senior boys in 1990 at the age of 15. She reported the incident to the school and underwent a medical examination that revealed she had been infected with herpes, but the school covered it up. After graduating from St. Paul's in 1992, Crawford attended Princeton University. It was there, in 1994, that Crawford's seminar instructor Toni Morrison encouraged her to write the assault into a book. She declined that idea at the time, writing a master's thesis on the use of rape testimony in legal cases instead.” (Wiki)

In 2017 Crawford started writing her memoir that describes how her school, St. Paul, treated girls who reported sexual abuse or assault from the 1990s through 2006. It took 14 weeks for her to complete the written portion of her very powerful memoir. I urge everyone to read it (or listen) as the details of what she endured and how the school treated her are unbelievable. Painted as a slut by the school and its powerful religious and secular allies, she states, “It is better to be a slut, than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan horse style, has silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue, but voice.” The book bears witness to that which courts denied, as an out of court settlement was ultimately arranged. She notes, “Where there can not be justice, there is sometimes clarity, and this is its own mercy.”