January marks National Stalking Awareness Month and across NC State’s campus efforts are underway to commemorate the month and reduce interpersonal violence.
“Stalking is any kind of repeated unwanted contact,” said Sara Forcella, rape prevention education coordinator at the NC State University Women’s Center. “It would have to be unwanted, if this person is totally fine that their former partner is waiting for them every day after class then that’s not stalking because that person is fine with it. If it’s causing that person some undue level of stress or fear then that’s the point where those behaviors become problematic.”
The Women’s Center will host events throughout the month designed to educate students on healthy relationships and reduce interpersonal violence including Stalking 101, Healthy Relationships 101 and Bystander Behavior 101. The dates and times of the events can be found on the Women’s Center website.
“It’s a month to raise awareness and for folks to get connected to the Women’s Center and to get connected to some of the interpersonal violence work that we do,” Forcella said. “We will definitely continue to do work that focuses on culture change on campus, getting folks connected with resources [after January].”
Students affiliated with The Movement Peer Educators, a student organization created within the Women’s Center, took the lead in organizing many of the activities around Stalking Awareness Month.
“We meet around two times a month, sometimes three, in an awareness month to discuss what’s going on in our organization, we have around thirty peer mentors,” said Maggie Schroder, a fourth-year studying social work and foreign languages and literature and president of The Movement Peer Educators.
The Movement Peer Educators plan to host workshops throughout the month within the Women’s Center on healthy relationship behavior and active bystander participation.
“Stalking Awareness month is a high priority for us and so is Sexual Assault Awareness Month which is in April,” Schroder said. “It’s very normalized in the culture, not just on TV but in music and in the language people use. People will say things like ‘oh I’m going to Facebook stalk them’ when stalking is a serious crime and it’s not funny to survivors of stalking.”
The Women’s Center provides on-campus resources to students dealing with stalking or other interpersonal violence.
“Some things that a student that is dealing with stalking may find beneficial are getting things like class accommodations, connecting them to their professors, changes in housing if they live in this one place on campus and they’re feeling unsafe because of stalking is something we can do,” Forcella said. “Connecting them with other offices if they want to make a Title IX Report are the main ways we can help someone that is dealing with stalking.”
Additional resources to go to off campus are also available to students encountering interpersonal violence.
“If this person ended up filing a protective order and needed to go to court or needed to go to the police station to do any kind of legal action we could physically accompany that person to be there for them to be their support person,” Forcella said.
The first event that the Women’s Center is hosting for the month is Stalking 101 on Thursday at 6 p.m.
The Women's Center on the top floor of Talley Student Union is one of the four Campus Community centers at NC State. The space was created by the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED), and has resources ranging from Book Club to counseling. The purpose of the Women's Center is to create a safe space for allies in the community to pursue gender equality and social justice.
