Mother Monster herself, Lady Gaga, and Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, have formed an unlikely alliance to help combat sexual assault on college campuses in New York.
Cuomo introduced legislation in February to strengthen New York colleges’ sexual assault policies, simultaneously launching the Enough Is Enough campaign to help rally support. New York lawmakers have just over one week to approve the bill (this year’s legislative session ends on June 17) and today Gaga and Cuomo published a co-authored op-ed piece to boost public awareness and help get the legislation pushed through.
In the piece, the pair call attention to the “unacceptable epidemic of sexual violence that is currently plaguing colleges and universities” (see: the recent prominent case of mattress-carrying Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz), and the need to pass a bill that will give New York state “the nation’s strongest laws to target campus sexual assault.”
Gaga has previously spoken publicly about her own experience of sexual assault. In an interview with Howard Stern in December 2014, she explained that her song “Swine” was inspired by her own assault, when she was 19, by an older music producer with whom she was working.
The op-ed puts an emphasis on speaking out about sexual assault (“in New York, fewer than five percent of rapes that occur on college campuses are reported to law enforcement”), and the need for colleges to reform their often reluctant and inadequate approach to prosecuting offenders (“a 2010 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that just a quarter of the individuals responsible for sexual assault were permanently removed from campus”).
“The likelihood that college students are not getting the assistance and support they deserve is heartbreaking, and the knowledge that sexual predators are left free to attack again is criminal,” write Gov. Cuomo and Gaga. “This bill will tackle this crisis head-on, because the status quo needs to change.”
Credits
Text Alice Newell-Hanson
Photography Wolfgang Tillmans
[The Hedonist Issue, No. 313, Summer 2011]