Stanford students launch tribute to sexual assault survivor Chanel Miller
Students at Stanford University on Friday launched an interactive, digital public tribute to Chanel Miller, whose sexual assault case caused an international outcry after Miller read a powerful victim impact statement in court.
The statement, published under the pseudonym for Miller used at the time of the 2016 case in California, Emily Doe, called out the legal and media systems that presented her assailant with more sympathy than the victim.
“Chanel Miller has become emblematic of a survivor reclaiming her own voice and we hope with our project to become a small part of that, lifting her voice,” said Hope Schroeder, the director of the memorial project, Dear Visitor.
Using augmented reality, the Dear Visitor team is designed to project excerpts of Miller’s statement on a garden near the site where the assault occurred. Visitors can also hear Miller read her own words aloud, as well as the voices of students speaking about how the case impacted the campus.
The memorial is also an effort to preserve the history of an event that sparked a debate about campus sexual assault, particularly for students who started classes this week and were not at the elite school when the trial happened in 2016.
“Part of this project is about making sure that students five to 10 years from now don’t go to that site and not know what it is,” Schroeder said.
Stanford created the garden where the Dear Visitor project is located after discussions with Miller’s representatives to show support for Miller and survivors of sexual violence. The school’s garden project became mired in controversy after Stanford and Miller disagreed about a plaque for the site that would excerpt part of the statement.
Stanford University rejected Miller’s suggested quote, provided to them through a representative, and rejected a second option Miller’s team provided. The school then suggested other quotes from the impact statement to use. Miller rejected the alternatives and asked that the garden not reference her.
Stanford’s provost, Persis Drell, explained the decision in March 2018, in a letter the school’s representatives said is still current.
“While acknowledging the powerful nature of the suggested quote, I and others felt that it expressed sentiments that would not be supportive in a healing space for survivors,” Drell said. “We believed there were many passages from Emily Doe’s letter that are both eloquent and appropriate.”
Schroeder said the Dear Visitor team consulted sexual assault experts and the school while developing the installation. They thought a plaque commemorating Miller’s words was important because people visit the site without knowing the context.
While developing the project, the Dear Visitor team members visited the site frequently and would see beer cans and cartridges for vaping pens strewn across it. In one interview for the project, someone said they heard two young men discussing their recent sexual exploits in the garden.
“There’s already so much erasure, you never know what other places in public spaces are unmarked,” Schroeder said. “Goodness knows what violence has happened here on this indigenous land on which Stanford finds itself. Those things are lost and we have an opportunity here to make sure that this doesn’t become lost.”
Miller had been referred to as Emily Doe until this month, when she identified herself publicly and released a book about the assault and ensuing public outcry about the way the case was handled by the perpetrator, the judge and some media. Her assailant, Brock Turner, was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault and sentenced to six months in jail – three months of which he ultimately served.