Student Receives IRB Approval to Collect and Display Comments From Sexual Assault Victims
April 1, 2017 3 minutes read
"He was a friend of mine,” the handwriting reads.
It is sewn on a sheet among a mix of similar, stark statements, written in different styles of handwriting to symbolize the individual source of each quote.
“I wish trying to erase my pain hadn’t caused me more pain.”
Anonymous by design, they nevertheless speak as both the one and the many, all students, all victims of campus sexual assault attending Notre Dame University or nearby St. Mary’s College, both in South Bend, IN.
Student Mary Kate Healey came up with the idea as her thesis project for a BA in art design. To get clearance to collect and display the comments on a 4’ x 9’ sheet of fabric, Healey found she would need to go before the IRB at Notre Dame.
“I was a little bit concerned,” she says. “It was something I was totally unfamiliar with. But luckily I have some friends who are psychology majors [with IRB experience] who really helped me through the process. The biggest thing the IRB wanted was to make sure everything was as ethical as possible.”
For example, the 64 respondents were recruited for the project on Facebook, filling out an anonymous online survey that Healey created.
“What the IRB really wanted to know was that I had a good informed consent process,” she says. “You couldn’t participate unless you were at least 18 and clicked that you consented as part of the survey. The IRB also emphasized at the end of the survey I needed to supply resources for people who were [victims of sexual assault]. Not only resources on campus, but also national organizations.”
To ensure confidentiality, the consent form did not ask for identifying information, and any names that were submitted with the comments were changed to pronouns. Thus, by design the study was an exercise in trust, as there was no way to establish if the comments were accurate.
“There was no way to verify if they were true, but I think that is part of the process,” Healey says. “A lot of times [assault victims] are told they are lying: ‘How do we know what you are saying is true?’ So I think having this blind trust in people was important.”
The IRB took a serious and thorough view of the project.
“I had to go through [the IRB] process a couple of times, mostly because I was unfamiliar with it,” she says. “I didn’t necessarily fill out everything to their standards the first couple of times. It was a process of several months. At least at Notre Dame, they want to make sure everything is perfect before you can be approved. There was some separate paperwork you have to fill out if you are advertising [recruiting] on social media.”
For example, the IRB wanted to see the research recruitment language that would be posted on social media. After the hurdles were clear, the responses came in.
“Some people wrote very little,” she says. “I had some people who wrote pages and pages. So I pulled out one or two sentences that I thought were really powerful.”
She had different people write — thus using various styles of handwriting — the comments in dressmaker’s invisible ink, which can serve as a stitching guide but then disappears.
“The other thing that was important to me was that there was no clear narrative,” Healey says. “Some people had multiple quotes, some people just one, but you don’t know who these people are or how they connect to each other. Once it was pretty full, I started stitching over it. I did the vast majority of it myself, but I also had sewing circles where I would invite people to volunteer and we would go to a very public part of campus and sew together. People would often come up to us and ask what we are doing because people don’t usually sew at the library. It was another way to initiate dialogue.”
The sewing and stitching as a form of communication and protest has roots in the suffragettes and the women’s movement. The stitching of the words was labor intensive, but the greater toll was emotional in reading the testimony of the victims, she says. Along with the work of other Fine Arts students, the sheet is to be displayed April 7 at the Snite Museum of Art on the Notre Dame campus.
A Notre Dame student received approval for her design project including the statements of sexual assault victims.
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