Themes and influences

Seeing as we came up with a narrative idea of sexual assault/rape, I decided to look into the subject matter further. I was so shocked by many of the statistics I found regarding sexual assault. However, the statistics helped give us a broader understanding of how frequent sexual assault cases are and how they are covered up and portrayed differently by a variety of media platforms.

Sexual violence statistics (United States of America):

1 in 5 women and 1 in 75 men will be raped at one point in their life.

46.4% lesbians, 74.9% bisexual women and 43.3% heterosexual women reported sexual violence
other than rape during their lifetimes. (40.2% gay, 47.4% bisexual men and 20.8% heterosexual).

Nearly 1 in 10 women and 1 in 45 men have been raped by an intimate partner.

91% of women and 9% of men are victims of rape/ sexual assault.

In 8 out of 10 cases of rape, the victim knew the person who assaulted them.

Each rape costs around $151, 423 and costs the US more than any other crime ($127 billion annually; second- assault, third- murder).

81% of women and 35% of men report impacts such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Rape is the most under-reported crime; 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.

The prevalence of false reporting is between 2% and 10%. For example, a study of eight US communities, which included 2,059 cases of sexual assault, found a 7.1% rate of false reports.

A study of 136 sexual assault cases in Boston found a 5.9% rate of false reports. Researches studied 812 reports of sexual assault from 2000 to 2003 and found a 2.1% rate of false reports.

Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)

During her final year of her visual arts degree at Columbia University, New York City (2014- 15), Emma Sulkowicz conducted a work of endurance performance art as a senior thesis called 'Carry that weight'.

Starting in September 2014, she carried a 50-lb mattress (one used in Columbia dorm rooms) wherever she went on campus. She argues that she would end her thesis when the student that allegedly raped her in her dorm room in 2012 was expelled from/ left the university. Sulkowicz carried the mattress until the end of the Spring semester as well as to her graduating ceremony in May 2015.

The student accused was found 'not responsible' by a university inquiry into the allegations, where he called the accusation "untrue and unfounded". He also called the performance an act of bullying.

Sulkowicz filed a police complaint in May 2014 but criminal charges were not pursued due to a lack of reasonable suspicion. In April 2015, the accused student filed a lawsuit against Columbia University, its trustees, president Lee Bollinger and art professor Jon Kessler and Sulkowicz's thesis supervisor, alleging that they exposed him to gender-based harassment by allowing the mattress performance to take place on campus (for course credit). Nevertheless, the lawsuit was dismissed in March 2016.

Sulkowicz alleges that on the first day of her second year, at Columbia University in August 2012, she was slapped, choked and anally raped in her dorm room by another student during what began as a consensual sexual encounter. The accused denied the allegations claiming that it was all consensual. Sulkowicz filed a complaint after she came across two fellow female students who claimed they had been victimized by the same individual, they later filed individual complaints themselves. However, Columbia university cleared him of responsibility in all three cases.

The case attracted widespread media attention after the three female students gave interviews to the New York Post, which was published December 11, 2013; the article didn't provide any names however. In April 2014, Sulkowicz appeared with Senator Kristen Gillibrand at a press conference about campus sexual assault.

Emma Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 for her senior thesis at the Yale University summer school of art and music, she was supervised by Jon Kessler.

Her first attempted movement was a video of herself moving a bed out of a room along with the audio of her filing the police report as her accompaniment.; this is how the mattress became a key focus of the thesis.

She carried the mattress around campus and created some 'rules of engagement' in which she had to follow. This included the rule that she had to carry it when on university property, it had to remain on campus when she was absent, and she wasn't allowed to ask for help in carrying it, although if someone offered she could accept. Sulkowicz kept a diary throughout, amounting to around 59,000 words recording her experiences.

 "I do think that nowadays art pieces can include whatever the artist desires and in this performance art piece it utilizes the elements of protest ..."

"To me, the piece has very much represented [the fact that] a guy did a horrible thing to me and I tried to make something beautiful out of it."