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Lately, Laura Dunn has tried to avoid thinking about rape on the weekends, but it doesn’t come naturally for the meticulous lawyer. Her idea of unwinding includes binge-watching Law & Order: SVU, not exactly light entertainment for a woman whose weeks are spent fielding calls and emails about the very topic — sexual assault — that dominates the show. For Dunn, though, this world of virtuous detectives and prosecutors is an escape from the calls and emails she receives from people asking for help, from the start of her workday at 8 a.m. until she’s collapsing into bed around 11 p.m. People who’ve been raped, people whose children were raped, people whose reports of rape were ignored and who finally got fed up enough to do something about it.

People like Laura Dunn.

If you saw Dunn, 31, walking along K Street with her shoulder-length brown hair draped over her blazer and modest blouse, you might take her for a young civil servant in the federal government, toeing the line of some older white guy. Dunn is nothing of the sort. She runs SurvJustice, a nonprofit that in its brief lifespan is credited with ushering in at least 120 federal investigations of schools around the country. She spent time at Joe Biden’s official vice presidential residence, and one of Biden’s former advisers, Lynn Rosenthal, sits on SurvJustice’s board. State and federal lawmakers ask her to endorse legislation. Still, Dunn wants more. Much more.

“I’m always mad that we’re not bigger,” said Dunn, matter-of-factly. “I want to be Gloria Allred big. People know if your civil rights get violated, you go to the ACLU. I want people to know if you get raped, you go to SurvJustice.”

The nation reckoned with sexual violence like never before during Barack Obama’s tenure, due in part to actions taken by his administration, but more so because of survivors coming forward about what had happened to them. Women stood up against the famous men they say abused them, like Bill Cosby or Darren Sharper, and hallowed institutions like Penn State and Baylor University were publicly accused of prioritizing football above stopping sex crimes on campus. So much progress was made discussing rape that many pundits and writers — including Dunn — assumed Donald Trump, man widely condemned for describing how he would commit sexual assault, could never be elected.

Trump’s victory wasn’t just a cultural shock for people like Dunn. It brought fears that his administration would roll back enforcement of federal rules intended to help campus rape victims. An even bigger worry for many advocates is that they’ve just lost a president who spoke out against sexual violence and who has been replaced by one who defended his own misogyny as “locker room talk.”

“I did not picture any alternative to Hillary winning,” Dunn said. “So I was surprised and it did cause some panic — everything I’ve spent years working on already may get pushed back. It was definitely something I personally mourned.”

Laura Dunn at the SurvJustice office in Washington, DC.

Stephen Voss for BuzzFeed News

SurvJustice, which Dunn started in 2014, provides legal help to women and men who have been sexually assaulted, mainly on college campuses. Decades of research have come to the same conclusion: that around one-fifth to one-quarter of all women will experience some form of sexual assault — from battery to rape — by the time they graduate college. A national Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation poll came to the same conclusion in 2015, as did a national survey of 150,000 students at 27 campuses.

Dunn lives in Washington, DC, to stay involved in federal policy. SurvJustice’s new office is a reflection of Dunn: practical and unfussy, with few things on the walls and a potted tree in the corner. It’s on 15th Street, around the corner from the White House. It served as a meet-up spot for herself and a few others for the Women’s March last month, 850 miles from the ultra-conservative Madison, Wisconsin, home where she grew up.

Dunn, the youngest of four children, was a confident child who coolly planned her life and dreamed of becoming a prosecutor. Her mother, Vicky, recalled that when her daughter was getting ready to start ninth grade, she vowed to earn 12 varsity letters in high school, which turned out to be exactly how many she won. “What Laura decided to do, she would actually follow through on,” Vicky said.

Dunn (fourth from left) with teammates at a cross-country race in high school.

Courtesy of Laura Dunn

She went on to college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joined the crew team, and appeared to be off to a good start.

In July 2005, Dunn, who had been living on campus, arrived back at the family’s house after her sophomore year and took her mother aside. She had to talk to her about something. Then Dunn, 19 at the time, told her mother that after a night of drinking with two guys on the rowing team her freshman year, she had gone back to an apartment with them. There the men raped her, she said.

Her mom rushed from the room and grabbed Dunn’s dad. “Laura’s dad was always her strong person,” Vicky explained. Vicky stayed back around the corner and listened as a hysterical Dunn shared what had happened to her — “just agonizing, words flowing, screaming, a lot of crying,” Vicky said, “and I couldn’t really bear to see that.”

Dunn’s parents are religious conservatives, members of an Evangelical Free church. Her parents demanded she leave UW–Madison and either transfer to a college of their choosing or become a religious missionary. They threatened to cut her off financially if she stayed at the university, said Dunn, who 11 years later became visibly frustrated as she recounted the conversation.

”They wanted me to be closer to God because they thought this school, this liberal school, had a negative effect on me, and that’s what led up to all of this,” Dunn said. As Dunn tells it, her parents considered her a sinner: “They had this idea I had brought shame on the family.”

Instead of doing what her parents wanted, she returned to UW–Madison. “And that was one of the most painful moments of my life,” said Dunn. Back on campus, she cried in her room as she worried about how to repair the rift with her parents — and how to pay for her own tuition. Her parents didn’t end up cutting her off — her father later called and said he admired her for standing up for herself.

“We were really in a highly protective mode,” Vicky explained. It became clear pretty quickly, Vicky said, that Dunn wasn’t going to bow, even though she saw one of these accused men on campus regularly. Vicky recalled that Dunn’s attitude was, “Why should she have to leave?”

Dunn (second from right) celebrating her last day at UW–Madison.

Courtesy of Laura Dunn

That attitude still drives Dunn. “She has no problem staring down anybody and everybody,” said S. Daniel Carter, SurvJustice’s board secretary. Carter said Dunn knows all too well what it’s like to be doubted by friends, blamed by family members, and let down by her school.

It took Dunn over a year to report being assaulted to the university’s dean of students and the UW–Madison police, which she did in July 2005, shortly before telling her parents. By that time one of the men had graduated, while the other remained on campus and on the crew team. Dunn had dropped the sport to avoid seeing them, and friends dropped her. One urged her to forget about pursuing the case because he didn’t want to testify against one of the accused, who was also a friend.

Both men said the sex was consensual, and neither was ever charged by police or disciplined by the school. It took nine months for the university to tell Dunn it was dropping the case.

“I thought that was it,” Dunn said. But little by little, Dunn, infuriated by her experience, began moving into the spotlight. She joined an on-campus organization dedicated to combating sexual violence. She was quoted in local newspapers talking about sexual violence, and sometimes she discussed her own incident. She caught the attention of Carter, who at the time was with the Clery Center for Security on Campus and running campus safety training programs for college administrators. He advised Dunn to file a Title IX complaint against her university with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, often just referred to as the OCR, which she did.

In 2008, the OCR ruled in the university’s favor. By then, Dunn had graduated and was teaching in post-Katrina New Orleans, planning on applying to law schools. But she agreed to take her story national as a favor to Carter, who was working with journalists from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit organization. When the story came out in February 2010, it catapulted Dunn onto the radar of federal officials, including at the White House.

Dunn doesn’t often get emotional, but she does when speaking about statements that President Obama and Vice President Biden made about sexual violence. At a White House event dedicated to combating campus rape in September 2014, Obama credited the survivors who raised hell to get the issue on the nation’s radar. “This is not your fight alone,” Obama said. “You are not alone, and we have your back.” At the same event Biden said, “Our culture still asks the wrong questions. … Never — get this straight — never is it appropriate for a woman to ask, ‘What did I do?’”

Barack Obama speaks at the “It's on Us” White House event in 2014.

Whitehouse.gov / Via youtube.com

“I’m so in awe that the two most powerful men in our entire country were saying everything I wish I heard when I was suffering alone,” Dunn said through tears. One of her father’s early questions about her assault, Dunn said, was, “What were you wearing?”

Dunn recalled that moment one evening in January as she wrapped up work on SurvJustice’s first civil lawsuit, filed against Old Dominion University in Virginia. In the federal suit, a young woman accuses campus police of holding her for hours without access to food, water, medical attention, or bathroom breaks when she reported a brutal rape on Oct. 12, 2014. The lawsuit says campus police declined to press charges despite physical evidence available. Then the school failed to help her as she struggled academically after the assault, according to the lawsuit. By the time Dunn got involved in the case, three months had passed since the assault and the student’s grades had slipped so badly that she’d lost a scholarship.

“It kills us when we think had they reached out a week earlier, a month earlier, they would’ve had a different life experience,” said Dunn.

Since Dunn hit the national stage, she’s often gotten results. Seven years to the day after Dunn was raped, Biden invited Dunn to an event at the University of New Hampshire where the vice president and Education Department officials unveiled a directive that mandated how schools should deal with sexual assault under the gender equity law Title IX. It told schools they couldn’t simply hand cases over to cops, or ignore assaults because they had happened off campus. It said investigations should take no more than 60 days, not the often months-long waits that students — including Dunn — endured after reporting rapes. It was a huge moment for Dunn, and it shook the educational world.

Dunn and Biden at the unveiling of the Dear Colleague letter, April 4, 2011.

Courtesy of Laura Dunn

As she listened to Biden, Dunn said, she saw that the pain of having gone public with her own ordeal was worth it. “I received my justice,” she wrote in a blog post that day. “Now it is my turn to help others achieve it.”

Dunn got busy. She spoke alongside Nancy Pelosi as she lobbied in favor of legislation establishing new rights for students in college sexual assault cases. Not only did it pass as part of the Violence Against Women Act’s reauthorization in 2013, but Dunn was picked to be on a committee that helped write how the law would be implemented. The following year, she helped craft a sexual assault policy for the State University of New York system, and then Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law mandating that private colleges adopt key pieces of the policy as well.

As Dunn became more active, the 2011 federal directive, which came to be known as the Dear Colleague letter, was gaining steam. The directive led universities nationwide to rewrite their policies on responding to campus sexual assault. As students became aware of the rights they had under Title IX if they were assaulted, they began filing complaints against schools accused of violating them. The number of complaints jumped from 11 in 2010 to 32 in 2013. Last year, it reached 177. In January 2014, Obama launched a White House task force on campus rape and gave the first presidential speech on combating sexual assault.

Campus rape became a proxy for the Obama administration’s larger effort to combat violence against women in general. “The feeling really was if we can get it right here, this will have a ripple effect throughout communities that are affected,” said Rosenthal, who was a White House adviser on violence against women.

Soon enough, there was a culture shift. “No means no” became an outdated mantra, replaced by “only yes means yes” to emphasize that it doesn’t take a woman screaming “no” to show she doesn’t consent. Biden teamed with Lady Gaga at the Oscars in 2016 to talk about sexual violence.

“When I was their age, I didn’t know I had any rights, or I didn’t have any rights — or both,” said Gloria Allred, the feminist attorney, who has gained fame for representing sexual assault victims. “We had no expectation we’d be treated fairly. If anything we had an unconscious expectation of, well, that’s the way the world is, we’re going to get raped and nobody’s going to do much about it. But now there’s a very different expectation among young people, and I’m glad about that.”

Dunn on Capitol Hill in 2014 (left), and being interviewed on the Today show in 2015 (right).

C-SPAN / Via c-span.org

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