April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. NC State marked this with several programs put on by the Women’s Center including Take Back the Night, the Clothesline Project and Denim Day.
Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which was officially established in 2001, has roots as early as the 1970s. The purpose of the month is to raise public awareness about sexual violence and to educate communities on how to prevent it.
Sara Forcella, the rape prevention education coordinator of the NC State Women’s Center, said that sexual assault is very common nationally. She added that one in four college women have survived rape, 40 percent of gay men experience sexual violence and men in college are five times more likely to experience sexual assault than men outside of college.
“Changing the statistics that I mentioned takes time and work,” Forcella said. “It takes commitment, not just from a select few. Change will not happen if it does not involve each and every member of our Wolfpack, including our students and organizations, athletic teams, faculty and our administrators. Changing our culture means creating a campus which supports survivors.”
Majesty Allah, a freshman studying sport management and a student staff worker at the Women’s Center, said April’s programs have all been focused around interpersonal assault.
“Recently, we’ve been promoting sexual assault [awareness], domestic assault [awareness] and relationship violence awareness,” Allah said. “We just had a march, [the] Take Back the Night event, where we marched around University Plaza, we chanted as well, just to bring awareness to this issue of sexual assault.”
Forcella spoke about the Clothesline Project, one of the programs the Women’s Center has been holding all month, where survivors can feel free to express themselves and talk about their experiences.
“Those are all T-shirts that were created this year by survivors,” Forcella said, in reference to the T-shirts hung up in Talley. “We have hundreds of T-shirts. So, these just represent the ones we had from this year, just from survivors that felt comfortable creating them. I think they’re pretty impactful.”
According to RAINN, the country’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, an American is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds. An 18–24-year-old woman in college is three times as likely to be sexually assaulted as another woman outside that age range.
RAINN also states that 11.2 percent of all undergraduate and graduate students experience some form of sexual assault through physical force, violence or incapacitation. RAINN gets its statistics primarily from the National Crime Victimization Study, which is conducted by the United States Department of Justice.
Of all the cases of sexual assault, only 344 out of 1,000 are reported to police. Of those 344, about 57 will lead to an arrest and an eventual six will lead to the perpetrator being incarcerated. Among women in college, only about 20 percent of all sexual assaults are reported.
Next Wednesday, the Women’s Center will host Denim Day in Stafford Commons. Denim Day was inspired by a 1998 Italian Supreme Court ruling that overturned a rape conviction because the justices found that the victim was wearing jeans that were too tight to be removed without help, thereby implying consent. The ruling sparked outrage, causing women in the Italian Parliament to wear jeans to work the next day. In 1999, the first Denim Day was established in the United States.
Denim Day will be the final event in Sexual Assault Awareness Month. All are encouraged to stop by Stafford Commons Wednesday from noon–2 p.m.
Allah feels that this month has been very effective in spreading awareness about the sexual violence that occurs on campus.
“It most definitely shined a light in my eyes about how prevalent this issue is here on NC State campus and what we can do to stop it,” Allah said.
Students march through the Brickyard as a part of the Take Back the Night event on Wednesday. The event was started to help put a stop to rape culture and to address issues of sexual violence on campus.
