Empathy as a form of prevention

Content warning: This article contains references to sexual assault and violence. 

A grassroots, student-led organization called A Path 2 Courage has partnered with USC Hillel and Breaking Silence Co. to create an interactive exhibit featuring three stories of sexual assault. Beginning Thursday, visitors to the Ronald Tutor Campus Center’s Franklin Suites #350 will walk through the recreated settings of where the abuse took place and listen to stories from survivors.

Sophie Pollack, the founder of A Path 2 Courage, is a junior majoring in sociology. In April 2020, she founded the organization to take her own experience with sexual assault and domestic violence and create a space of healing and open dialogue, specifically within Greek life. 

“Being a survivor myself, I really tried to think of what could other people benefit from hearing what I’ve gone through or what I’ve experienced in my trauma, healing, and putting my own personal feelings aside and really using it as like, ‘You know, someone who’s gone through this,’ to make it more personal and not just like a news headline that the sexual assault at this fraternity happened,” Pollack said.

Her decision to bring Breaking Silence Co.’s exhibit to USC was part of her chain of presentations at various Greek Life organizations on campus and her overall goal to educate and proactively engage the Greek Life community in this exhibit.

“I’ve presented this semester in 13 of the 15 USC chapters on my lonesome,” Pollack said. “It’s been pretty empowering. So far, the response has been really amazing. People have really stepped up to advocate for other survivors in the system that have been silenced and also themselves.”

“It’s been pretty empowering. So far, the response has been really amazing. People have really stepped up to advocate for other survivors in the system that have been silenced and also themselves.”

Sophie Pollack, the founder of A Path 2 Courage and a junior majoring in sociology

USC is still reeling from sexual assault reports occurring at fraternity houses, including Sigma Nu, Chi Phi Eta Delta, Delta Tau Delta and Phi Kappa Tau, last October that let the University to place four fraternities on interim suspension and one on modified suspension. Ten fraternities have since disaffiliated with the University, while the still-affiliated Sigma Delta Alpha fraternity has limited operations as of publication.

Pollack said that when she was raising the $10,000 to bring the exhibit to USC, she thought about fraternity members as the exhibit’s target audience.

“I started thinking, ‘Who really needs to walk through this exhibit the most?’” Pollack said. “Their members of that community are kind of where I targeted. ‘You need to be here. I need you to walk through this, please.’”

Alli Meyerhardt, founder of Breaking Silence Co., described the upcoming exhibit, emphasizing the ways visitors can engage with it. Instead of staged scenarios, the exhibit will feature the unfiltered stories of survivors in an immersive environment.

“You hear those stories on a headset, and then we recreate the settings of wherever the abuse or violence and healing took place,” Meyerhardt said. “Those three stories are coming from the actual survivors. They wrote the scripts, they recorded the stories themselves.”

The exhibit coming to USC is part of Breaking Silence’s flagship program. The exhibit is hosted by a wide variety of institutions that seek to experience the immersive program and learn.

“We work with universities, bars, breweries, businesses, government agencies,” Meyerhardt said. “And our whole thing is we use stories in order to ignite a conversation around what is interpersonal violence and promote healing and empathy for those who walk through our program.”

“Our whole thing is we use stories in order to ignite a conversation around what is interpersonal violence and promote healing and empathy for those who walk through our program.”

Alli Meyerhardt, founder of Breaking Silence Co.

The stories will engage with the harsh reality of sexual violence in a blunt manner. To give a taste of the content, Breaking Silence’s Co.’s online audio tour features a woman describing her experience with her abusive husband.

“He would hold his knife to my pregnant belly and threaten to kill the baby or cut the baby out of me and leave me for dead. I can still see myself pinned to the wall with a knife to my throat on Christmas Day,” the woman describes. 

The stories will convey the emotions felt by not just the survivors, but the offender. Of the stories that will be on display, some will feature the perpetrator’s perspective to give a rare perspective on sexual assault and healing. 

Miranda Kofford, a senior majoring in theatre and board member of A Path 2 Courage, explained that the impact of hearing the perspectives of the perpetrators will help people to understand just how severely sexual assault can derail the lives of the victims.

“It’ll inspire everyone who goes to the exhibit to think about [sexual assault] as a big picture thing, rather than just a blip,” Kofford said. “That’s something these men and these perpetrators don’t understand is the impact it can have on the victims and the victims’ families and just the community: everyone around them is affected.”

The content is so immersive, Meyerheardt said, that, alongside student volunteers from Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention and Services, licensed therapists will be present to inform students of resources available and help them digest the material.

Leenie Baker, the wellness director at USC Hillel, described the importance of having a safe space to engage with exhibit’s hard topics. The therapists present at the exhibit will be one way to facilitate that. 

“A huge part of the exhibit is trying to keep it as safe and secure a place for students to engage with an uncomfortable topic area,” Baker said. “In order to make that happen, we are having a licensed therapist present basically the entire exhibit.”

Meyerhardt said it’s important to have difficult conversations by placing visitors in the setting and unearthing survivors’ emotions in the exhibits. 

“The goal always is a common understanding of how do we have hard conversations? How do we enter into spaces with empathy as a form of prevention?” Meyerhardt said.  

Pollack also expressed what conversations she wanted to start among students, emphasizing her long term goal of creating a culture of fighting sexual violence on campus, and of persuading men to fight against sexual violence. 

“[Attendees] can have a meeting afterwards to debrief – ‘What did you hear? What did you feel?’ – and really start the conversation,” Pollack said.

A previous version of this story stated that the exhibit would visually depict scenes of sexual assault. The exhibit will instead show settings where interpersonal violence has occurred. The Daily Trojan regrets this error.