In concert with activist pedagogy, Belenky et al. (1986) argue that all women enter higher education already knowers; but I can identify very few students who enter higher education already as Procedural or Constructed Knowers. Rather, I see most students—abused or not—entering the university in one of the first three increasingly subjective, and potentially vulnerable, epistemological positions. I consider the knowers in these positions vulnerable first because moving between positions is not a lock-step, linear progression forward. Like the moves out of being a victim, the epistemological moves are tentative, nonlinear, and highly recursive. Making the matter more complex, a person making these moves can inhabit one epistemological position in one environment—for example, school—and another position in a different environment—for example, home. In other words, the social setting greatly affects the knower’s epistemological position, particularly during periods of social role change such as entering college.

What are some indications and vulnerabilities of these subjective positions? Silent Knowers, who can appear as women who have had their spirits beaten out of them, lived in a world in which to know or, rather, to notice a view different than the norm was to have that knowledge erased or silenced:

You are stupid, I can’t believe it, you have no idea, on and on… The body language I can’t believe… At first I’d fight back but after a while, you can only take it for so long, I’d feel like I was shrinking, I started to believe it. It made me scared to ask for help or try to learn, I thought I couldn’t learn. So I didn’t even try. (emphasis in original, Horizons interview, as cited by Horsman, 2000, p. 58).