"I honestly feel very ashamed that my school took this action," the student said.
“There’s a rapist in our school and you know who it is.”
Those words, handwritten on a sticky note and posted in a high school bathroom, have led to a Maine teenager getting suspended — not the alleged rapist, but the 15-year-old girl who wrote the note.
Aela Mansmann, a sophomore, was suspended from Cape Elizabeth High School on Friday for “bullying” because she posted the note, which did not name anyone as an accused rapist.
“I honestly feel very ashamed that my school took this action,” Aela told BuzzFeed News.
It all started in September when Aela said she’d gotten “pretty fed up” with the amount of sexual assault and harassment her classmates were facing, apparently without consequences for the perpetrators.
So she and a friend put up that sticky note. Soon after, many more students posted similar notes in the bathroom speaking about their stories of sexual violence at the hands of classmates.
Aela’s note was not about one singular, specific rapist, she said.
“It was really addressing the general culture of our school, and keeping in mind several specific cases,” she said. “But there are so many it’s hard to pinpoint just one and advocate for just one of them.”
Later that day, school administrators called her into the office and launched an investigation into the sticky notes, she said.
“For three weeks, myself and other students were brought in for interviews and interrogation,” Aela said. “They promised all of us whoever put notes up would not be in trouble.”
Aela was interviewed three times over several weeks, and she never once heard of any of the students accused of sexual misconduct facing consequences.
But one of the accused apparently did go to school administrators — to report being bullied, Aela said.
“That kinda confuses me, right? Because this person wasn’t identified in the sticky notes,” she said. “In fact, there’s more than one person that was being referred to. Yet this person self-identified feeling targeted, so the school took steps to suspend me versus further investigating that self-identification.”
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we live in a world more concerned with protecting rapists than with protecting rape victims
