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Editor’s note: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault.

Chevara Orrin wanted her Thursday night lecture with Syracuse University students to be an open conversation.

Orrin, a public speaker and co-founder of We Are Allies, a national advocacy campaign that aims to support the LGBTQ community, spoke about her experience as a sexual assault survivor. Throughout the night, Orrin also discussed consent on college campuses and what’s next for the Me Too movement.

As her audience joined the Zoom call, “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child played in the background. She started off the conversation by playing that song to give meaning to the lyrics of “I will survive, keep on survivin’.”

Orrin said she was sexually assaulted as a child by her father, Rev. James Bevel, who was convicted in 2008 of committing incest against another of his daughters. Three months after the final sentencing, Bevel died from stage four pancreatic cancer.

“Over the past several decades, it has been a journey of learning, unlearning, discovery, rediscovery, and forgiveness,” she said. “Forgiveness so that I could live a fulfilled life and say ‘I’m a survivor, I’m not going to give up.’”

Orrin wrote an essay about her experience, “Soul Survivor: Reimagining Legacy,” for an online forum called “Love WITH Accountability.” During Thursday’s event, Orrin said silence suffocated her at the time.

“I had not yet discovered my strength,” Orrin said.

A month after she wrote the essay, Orrin received a Facebook request from Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement. Burke said to Orrin that her father was one of the catalysts that led her to start the movement. Orrin was shocked that Burke knew who she was, and the two had a 90-minute conversation about sisterhood, survivorship and solidarity.

Orrin asked students what being an active ally means, and she defined sexual violence as “any unwanted anything.”

“Sexual violence in any context is a traumatic experience,” she said. “There are so many survivors around us, and we have no idea who they are.”

During the conversation, Orrin displayed a video that New York University students produced about consent. The video showed clips of different students talking about how consent means that someone has ownership over their own body.

Both students and Orrin reflected about how consent is equal among all genders and specifically how the video opened up space for nonbinary people.

Orrin ended the conversation by emphasizing that, as a survivor, she first needed to accept that her journey is her journey. This took her a very long time to understand, she said.

“The journey of survivorship is deeply personal, and just because you’ve been sexually assaulted does not mean that you might ever be ready to tell your story,” Orrin said.

Published on April 30, 2021 at 1:13 am