What happens when your rapist's profile pops up on Facebook's "People You May Know" tab?
For recent University of Northern Colorado graduate Kevin Kantor, his alleged attacker's baby pictures and middle name forced Kantor to solidify characteristics of the traumatic memory he longed to bury into oblivion.
Kantor performed his spoken-word poem, "People You May Know," on the finals stage at the 2015 College Union's Poetry Slam Invitational last March as part of the "Best of the Rest" performances.
The three-minute performance reveals that Kantor refers to his alleged rapist as the "Wolf" in most of his works, in an effort to make him "as storybook as possible." Kantor's poem serves not only as his weapon against the attacker, but also as his instrument to voice his trauma, and to call out the friends and police officers who asked him why he didn't fight back.
According to his interview with The Independent, the 22-year-old was allegedly raped during his 2013 Spring Break. The poem also helped Kantor rebuild his relationship with his brother, Adam.
"[Adam] is absolutely my biggest support," Kantor told The Independent. "He's a very stoic man, a man of few words -- the opposite of me -- but we have sat down and talked about it and he understands."
Critics of "rape culture" in colleges and universities have become more vocal in recent years, due to what they call an insufficient response from school and police officials. Recently released documentary film, The Hunting Ground, delineates the purported epidemic on campuses in America, highlightinh testimonials from mostly female students who have been assaulted, as well as a few male victims. Although more female students report sexual assault than do male students, men still account for 17 percent of the sexual assault victims, according to the December 2014 data collected by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Kantor acknowledges this culture of silence around male victims in his Independent interview, stating, "We should all be striving for gender equality and to break down patriarchal notions of how things work."
"Every day, I write a poem titled 'Tomorrow,'" Kantor concludes in his poem. "It is a handwritten list of the people I know who love me. And I make sure to put my own name at the top."
Watch Kantor perform "People You May Know" below.