On Friday, President Barack Obama announced the White House’s new campaign to stop sexual assault on college campuses, which hopes to raise awareness by enlisting the support of student leaders, college sports leagues and celebrities from across the country.
The initiative, titled “It’s On Us,” is a national attempt to spread the message that fighting sexual assault on college campuses is the responsibility of more than just the victim: Every person attending a university should understand that sexual assault means and should speak up when necessary.
“This is on all of us, every one of us, to fight campus sexual assault,” President Obama said at the announcement Friday. “We are going to organize campus by campus, city by city, state by state. This entire country is going to make sure that we understand what this is about and that we’re going to put a stop to it.”
The campaign emphasizes the danger of the bystander effect by encouraging people to speak up when they see potential red flags regarding sexual assault and violence. One of the tips “It’s On Us” gave to people who made a commitment to the campaign was to “trust your gut” and to speak up when a situation seems potentially harmful.
“An estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years – one in five,” Obama said. “Of those assaults, only 12 percent are reported, and of those reported assaults, only a fraction of the offenders are punished.”
Obama said men need to participate in the effort in order to make sexual assault no longer acceptable on college campuses.
Student Body President Rusty Mau was part of a group of student body presidents who were invited to the White House for a conference in June to talk more about the planning of the “It’s On Us” campaign, and he has been closely working with the White House and other student leaders to help implement the initiative ever since.
Mau said the White House was already working on the initiative at this time, but it wanted to get feedback from campus presidents about how to make the most impact.
The campaign will be announced to the NC State student body soon, Mau said.
Along with the White House and college campuses across the country, many other interest groups associated with the college demographic, such as EA Sports, the NCAA and prominent celebrities, have joined the campaign.
“So when you are at an NC State football game and you see the ‘It’s On Us’ on the Jumbotron and you go home and you are playing Madden NFL and you see ‘It’s On Us,’ it’s a lot more opportunity to connect with students,” Mau said. “That’s what they are really focusing on, putting the ‘It’s On Us’ message in as many alternative platforms as possible.”
NC State is currently in the process of planning, and this week filming, its own public service announcement similar to the PSA available on the “It’s On Us” website.
“That key component of this campaign is helping everyone, especially males, understand that we are all a part of the solution and we all have to speak up,” Mau said. “It’s training students to, if you see something that is wrong, if you see something that needs to be changed, having the courage to stand up and say, ‘Hey I spotted this’ can make a difference.”
