A neighbor overheard Vanessa and her boyfriend shouting and the sound of something -- her body, it turns out -- hitting the dorm room wall one night in May 2014. The neighbor reported the fight to a residential assistant, who then reported it to Columbia University officials.

As a result, Vanessa, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, was called into a meeting the following week with a university official overseeing sexual violence cases at Columbia.

The university wanted to investigate the incident, but Vanessa did not want to make a report. She was not ready to admit that she was in a violent relationship. "I kept holding off on the investigation, waiting for him to get his shit together, and that never happened, Vanessa said.

Despite Vanessas unwillingness to participate in an investigation, the university imposed a no-contact order between her and her boyfriend. Columbia officials told her that the university would consider punishing her if she broke the no-contact order, according to emails obtained by The Huffington Post -- even though she was the one suspected to be in an abusive relationship. The punishment, officials said, could be as severe as suspension.

Vanessa and her boyfriend were still dating, so neither abided by the directive. But that meant that when Vanessa finally was ready to have her boyfriend's behavior investigated, she couldn't bring her case to the university, because that would have meant admitting that she had violated the order.

Colleges issue no-contact orders as a tool to protect victims from their alleged assailants, and apply confidentiality rules to prevent students from airing the school's dirty laundry. Several students told HuffPost they were threatened with possible suspension if they violated what they consider to be gag orders.

Indeed, in a number of cases, colleges issued veiled threats of punishment to survivors of reported sexual assaults, often telling them to keep their cases hush-hush in phrasing that some experts believe may violate federal law.

"Even if they never carry out the threat, the fact is that it's chilling the speech of a lot of victims," said Adam Goldstein, an attorney at the Student Press Law Center, an independent watchdog group that has long been concerned with college-imposed gag orders.

These threats have prevented sexual violence victims from getting protection from their universities or from police, made it difficult to get emotional support from friends and to discuss their experiences in public, shielded the colleges from outside scrutiny and, in some cases, simply made victims feel like they were the ones on trial.