When Katie Raphaelson was in high school, she lived, breathed and slept debate.

In 2016, the elite high school debater wasnt yet disillusioned with the debate community. She was 15, and her world was dominated by a desire to excel in the activity, which meant long, frequent team practices, traveling on the weekends to compete, and dreaming of making it to the Tournament of Champions.

She was just becoming well-acquainted with the regular group travel that competing in local and national tournaments required. Going to these tournaments was social and energizing and just one example of how competitive debate can take over your life when youre a teenager.

At one particular tournament requiring an overnight stay which was not uncommon Raphaelsons teammate, a girl, wanted to set up Raphaelson with Eric, a boy from another school whom HuffPost is not identifying by his real name. Two of Raphaelsons female teammates were sharing a hotel room at the tournament; Eric and another boy came to the room that night. A night hang turned into a sleepover, and Raphaelson says she ended up in a bed with Eric.

Raphaelson says her teammates, the other boy and Eric all knew that she openly identified as asexual, but that Eric still made unwanted sexual advances toward her. She says he repeatedly grabbed her hand even after she pulled it away, and then physically yanked her face around and forced her to kiss him.

The next morning, shaken, upset and exhausted, Raphaelson says the teammate who wanted to set her up with Eric told her not to tell their coach. So she ended up telling a friend from a different debate team that she had had a weird experience with Eric the night before and wasnt sure if it had been consensual. Raphaelson says she was vague about what had happened but remembers explicitly saying she wasnt raped.

But according to Raphaelson, that friend told her own coach that Raphaelson had been raped, and the coach called the police. (The coach who Raphaelson says contacted the authorities declined to comment, citing student privacy concerns.) Raphaelson says a police officer arrived at the tournament and questioned her about what had happened.

I didnt know how to verbalize it, because I kind of told myself its not that bad, Raphaelson said. You didnt get raped. Youre fine. But I was very obviously not OK. She also said she didnt want to mess things up for Eric because he had been doing well in the tournament.

Raphaelson is not certain whether an official report was filed, but she did not hear again from the police officer she spoke to that day.

When Raphaelson got home, she was plagued with such severe anxiety that she barely ate for two weeks. She told HuffPost that the incident and its aftermath left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Raphaelson, who is now a debate judge and coach, sees her experience as part of a fundamentally broken culture within the high school debate community.

This is partly what brought her to Nina Potischman, 21, a former Hunter College High School debater who had befriended Raphaelson when they were both coaching high school debate in California. This summer, Potischman, Raphaelson and six others created the Speech & Debate Stories Instagram account, which has collected and published more than 350 anonymous allegations of sexual violence, harassment, racism, homophobia and predatory behavior within the debate community.

The people behind the account have also been pushing the National Speech and Debate Association to make specific policy changes to protect current and future high school debaters.