Harvard women's soccer team members respond to sexually explicit 'scouting report'

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:33 p.m. ET

Aaron West

Last Tuesday, The Harvard Crimson reported on a document created by the 2012 Harvard men’s soccer team called a “scouting report,” which assessed and scored the incoming recruits for the women’s soccer team based on their perceived physical attractiveness.

On Friday, six female members of that 2012 incoming class wrote a powerful response, preferring to put aside the veil of anonymity and address the issues head-on with their own open letter.

Published in the Crimson, the six women (five of them finished their senior seasons with the team last fall) asserted that initially they wanted to brush off the report, as this type of action had come to be expected as “normal”. However, with the media frenzy around the story, they felt the need to shun anonymity and use the platform as an "opportunity to encourage our fellow women to band together in combatting this type of behavior."

The letter from 2016 graduates Kelsey Clayman, Brooke Dickens, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela and Haley Washburn can be read in its entirety here.

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