Part II of a three-part series. Part I can be found here on MichiganChronicle.com.
By Jon Vaughn
In 2020, the case that would bring more than 1,750 of us forward finally broke open. Those of us who had carried it for decades thought the hardest part would be getting anyone to listen.
For six years I have been turning over something nobody warned us about. Not the abuse. Not the cover-up. I know those stories by heart. What I think about is what arrives when the fight starts to be won.
The ecosystem arrives.
When a case like ours breaks open, it draws attention, and attention draws money. Settlements get announced. Documentaries get commissioned. Grants open up. And a whole ecosystem appears that was nowhere to be found when it was cold and dark and nobody was listening.
Some of it is real, and some of the people in it have been doing this work longer than any of us. I want to be clear about that. But some of it arrives for what the fight now attracts. I learned to tell the difference by asking one question: where were you when it cost something to be here?
Names become assets.
A survivor’s name is credibility. Credibility raises money. So names start to travel.
I have spent long hours on the phone with survivors who discovered their names, faces and stories being used by people they had never agreed to work with on websites, in presentations, in materials meant to show funders how connected an organization was. Nobody asked them. Most found out by accident.
For someone who has already had control of their own body taken from them, finding out that their name has been taken too is not a small thing. It is the same injury in a different form.
Stories become property.
Then comes the harder turn. The account a survivor gave to help someone else to a reporter, a researcher, an advocate, a filmmaker becomes something someone else claims to own.
I understand how it happens. Someone records it, transcribes it, shapes it, and begins to think of the shaped thing as theirs. But a survivor’s account of what was done to them is not raw material. It is the one thing that was never taken from them, and the movement should be the last place that tries to take it.
The founder becomes the organization.
Most organizations in this space begin with one person who saw a need nobody else would meet. That is how good work starts. It is also where the danger sets in.
When the organization is the founder, the board is the founder’s friends, and every report of harm travels through the founder’s office, there is no one whose job it is to say no. Governance is the least glamorous thing a nonprofit does and the first thing skipped when the mission feels urgent. The mission always feels urgent.
The money rewards the wrong things.
Funders fund what they can see: the event, the campaign, the survivor on stage. Almost nobody funds the independent reporting line, the outside audit, or the board seat held by someone with the standing to disagree. So organizations grow their visibility far faster than their accountability and the gap between the two is where people get hurt.
The survivors can’t afford to object.
This is the part that makes the rest possible. The people with the most reason to object are usually the ones least able to. A survivor who depends on an organization for counselling, for a platform, for a community for the first place that ever believed them is not going to risk all of that to complain about how their name was used. The power runs one way, and everyone inside knows it.
That is why it lands hardest in underserved communities. When there is only one door, you do not argue with the person holding it open.
What six years taught me
The fight against the institution was brutal, but it was clear. You knew who stood on the other side. When the truth finally broke through, I expected the hardest part to be behind me.
It wasn’t. The danger inside the movement is harder, because it wears our colors and speaks our language. It says it believes you, and it means it right up until believing you costs it something.
That is not a reason to walk away from advocacy. It is the reason to demand more of it. An institution failed us once. We should not build new ones that fail us the same way.
Which leaves a question every survivor, funder and board member eventually must face. If the movement is where we go for protection, who protects us from our protectors?
That is where I will pick up next.
Jon Vaughn is a former NFL running back, a survivor advocate for more than thirty years, and co-author of Co-Pay (ABA Publishing, 2027). This is the second of three pieces.
On Sunday, November 1, at 8 p.m. Eastern, campuses across the country and overseas will hold Take Back the Night in the same hour. If you have a loved one on a campus anywhere, send them this. One student standing alone counts the same as a rally. https://takebackthenight.org/national-campus-tbtn-rally/
