Kevin Kantor: Student logs into Facebook to see alleged rapist under 'people you may know'

A student who was raped two years ago has described logging into Facebook and seeing his alleged attacker appear on a suggested list of ‘people you may know’ in a powerful poem delivered in front of thousands.

Kevin Kantor, a spoken-word poet and acting student at the University of Northern Colorado, won two awards at the 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational with his poem, ‘people you may know’.

Kantor was allegedly attacked in March 2013 while on Spring Break. A friend took him to hospital, staff there contacted police on his behalf and he was interviewed, but no action was taken against his alleged attacker.

The 22-year-old told The Independent his interview with police and the reactions of his family only served to exacerbate his trauma. Kantor says they struggled with the concept of male rape and asked him why he did not fight back during the attack.

"The big thing I remember was that all of a sudden I was alone in a room with two officers, and I remember being asked whether I was assaulted, attacked, or raped. I just had no idea how to answer that," he said. "I was confused and I remember being told ‘if you don’t help us, we can’t help you’, which made me just shut down. There was no follow up – the majority of our interaction was 'if you don’t take further action, we won’t'. I wasn't in a place to help them."

Over a year later, he logged into his Facebook account and was confronted by a picture of the man who he says assaulted him.

"It was an incredibly jarring experience. I didn’t like break down, I didn’t have a physical reaction, I just felt stunned. That was hard to process - just knowing that I was more connected to him in a way the entire time.

"It made it harder [to deal with], it created more of a person where there one wasn’t before and it made it even more difficult for my mind to reconcile everything."

His three-minute performance addressed the difficulty of suddenly having access to his alleged rapist’s profile and details about his life, such as the music he listened to, his baby pictures, and the distress caused by being informed by Facebook that they had three mutual friends.

"That was what inspired me to write the piece," he said. "I wrote the first draft, all of 16 lines, that day - poetry and spoken word has been my go to since I moved to Colorado."

“Click,” his poem reads. “He is dancing with his shirt off. Click. He is eating sushi over a few beers with friends. Click. I know that alley. Click. I killed the memory of that T-shirt.

“Four people have told me they’d rather I said nothing. Two police officers told me that I must give his act a name or it didn’t happen. That obviously I could have fought back.

“Which is to say no-one comes running for young boys who cry rape.

“When I told my brother, he also asked me why I didn’t fight back. Adam, I am right now, I promise. Every day, I write a poem titled ‘Tomorrow’. 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.”

His rousing performance has been viewed almost 500,000 times on YouTube and has been met with wide-spread support and praise for confronting such a difficult issue on stage.

“Your poem is incredible. It brought shivers up my spine. Thank you, and keep fighting,” wrote one Twitter user. “Kevin Kantor's poem is why I believe in the power of words,” said another. “You are such an inspiration.”

Kantor said he has received messages from both male and female survivors of rape thanking him for his performance. "I really hope the one thing people take away from it is the realisation that the powers that be and the culture that we have are the exact same powers at play that silence all survivors of sexual violence.

"My survival mirrors that of female survivors being told that they were asking for it. We should all be striving for gender equality and to break down patriarchal notions of how things work."

His poem also helped his brother understand, discuss and come to terms with his experience. "That was my way of confronting him about that incident for the first time ever. The conversation with my brother was very literally the next day, it was back to back being pulled from two very different sources - two police officers and someone who has cared for me my whole life - having the same reaction.

"The poem was my way of reconciling and mending my relationship with him. He is absolutely my biggest support. 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."