Although my earlier experiences and work with the women's movement had trained me to identify this kind of behaviour and gave me some sense of what to do about it, nothing prepared me for the reality of it. This man had attacked me directly, and I felt vulnerable and defenseless. I was scared to go to school lest I run into him, and when I forced myself to go, I felt paranoid. I was teaching at the time, and my class suffered.

My own school work ground almost to a halt. I was unfocused, and I had headaches. I felt singled out for persecution, and even the reassurances of family and friends could not make me feel a self-assured part of the academic community again. It was not until later that I was told that the same man had harassed at least one other woman in the department. A number of people seemed to be aware of his problem, but nothing had been done to deal with it.

After a week or so I had run the gamut of emotions from shame through fear and anger, and I felt the need to do something, I told our professor, I filed a report with the sexual harassment office, I talked to the head of the department. This decision to take action helped me. I felt more in control of the situation. Still, this man had completely disrupted my life. My ability to work and to study had been interfered with in a violent way, and I turned to the university system for help.

When a student enrolls in school, she signs an implied social contract with that institution. When she pays her tuition, she pays for the privilege of learning and working in an atmosphere free of harassment. This contract was broken in my case by an obviously disturbed man, and I expected the university to set things straight. I discovered, however, that despite their policies about sexual harassment, many institutions are unprepared to deal with this kind of abuse.

Sexual harassment policies are terribly important. They are a kind of quasilegal process through which psychological violence can be brought to light. In my experience, however, they proved a double-edged weapon. Like many such procedures, the sexual harassment process turned out to be long and involved. In order to speed things up, the counselors I spoke with recommended a mediation process.

I was to sit, along with a mediator (a faculty member from my department who had received some training), in a room with my harasser and discuss what had happened. The theory, I suppose, is that I would feel empowered by such a confrontation and my harasser would feel chastened. In practice, however, the prospect of this confrontation was repellent to me. I am convinced that nothing I could have said would have helped this man or me, He needs a therapist, and I was neither qualified nor interested in the job.