April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). This year’s observation of SAAM marks the 20th anniversary of a movement to “raise awareness sexual violence around the world and to educate communities on how to prevent it.”

First, let us define the specific kind of sexual violence that SAAM is focused on raising awareness for: sexual assault. According to womenshealth.gov, sexual assault is “any type of activity sexual activity or contact” that a person did not consent to. 

This then leads us to more questions. What is it to consent to sexual activity? And what is it to not consent to sexual activity? We can answer these questions by looking at RAINN.org. RAINN is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization and a great resource for learning more about sexual assault prevention and safety. 

A person gives consent to participating in a sexual activity when they clearly say yes to participating. Consent can only be given by people who know what is going on and what is entailed in the sexual activity, is not threatened or under duress, is of age, is able to properly communicate ongoing consent and is not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

A lack of consent is when a person gives anything other than a clear yes to participating in a sexual activity. Even if a person does not directly say no to a particular sexual encounter, this does not automatically mean that an individual is in fact consenting to participating in said encounter. Giving consent to one type of sexual activity does not then mean that a person is giving consent to participating in another kind of sexual activity. 

Nor does it mean that the consent is unretractable or ever-lasting. A person can retract consent at any moment during a sexual encounter and all parties engaged should respect that individual’s decision to stop participating in the sexual encounter. 

What consent is and what it is not seems clear enough. There are a plethora of resources out there to help simplify the slew of information given above. As this website shows, there are numerous comics, videos and infographics to help get the basics of what consent looks like and what it does not. 

With all these resources and the ease by which we can access them in an age of digitization, why should we need a month to raise awareness of sexual assault? Statistics for sexual assault should be low given this the access we have to resources

Access to resources is all well and good, but sexual assault is a major problem worldwide. It is this easy-going attitude about sexual assault that is part of the problem.

To illustrate just how much of a problem sexual assault is in the United States, one only needs to see the statistics which can be found on RAINN.org. Every 73 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. At least 1 in 6 women have been a victim of an attempted or completed rape. In 1998, an estimated 17.7 million American women were victims of complete or attempted rape. In the U.S., 1 in 10 rape victims is male

College campuses are especially dangerous places. Female college students in between the ages of 18 and 24 are three times more likely than non-college females are  to experience sexual assault. On college campuses, 21% of transgender students have experienced sexual assault.

Obviously, sexual assault is a problem and we should be particularly concerned with educating students about given the increased risk associated with sexual assault on campus. But my aim with this article is more than just to spew facts and numbers about sexual assault on to a document – this is, after all, not the News nor the Features page. 

I am the Lifestyle Editor of The Hilltop Monitor. And, as the Lifestyle Editor, I have been trying to guide this page into being something more than just the usual grab-bag of pleasant trivialities. In my application for being part of the editorial staff, I mentioned that my ideal for a Lifestyle page was that it should be centered on trying to answer specific questions: What is it to live well? And how do we know? 

I imagine that this will get a couple of chuckles from the people who know me. I bring philosophy and ethics into everything I do, and it seems that I’m on a personal quest to turn the Lifestyle page into Ethics 101. Still, if a Lifestyle page is inspired and centered on our personal lives, why wouldn’t we want something that celebrates and seeks to cultivate our highest potential? We should want something that seeks to always uncover what good personal lifestyles are. 

I think that SAAM offers people the opportunity to take a moment to reflect on whether or not their lifestyles are in fact good in a way that’s about interpersonal relations. Even more importantly, SAAM is a time for people to reflect about things that we tend to not want to reflect about. 

It is undoubtedly true that a major component of SAAM is to bring awareness about the barebone facts that I touched upon above. What is consent? What percentage of people are survivors of sexual assault? Who is most at risk? 

The facts themselves should be well known, and the fact that they are not is appalling and speaks to the ways in which we tend to engage in a culture of victim-blaming. 

But, I think knowledge, which is what some of the word awareness is trying to capture within the title of SAAM, is more than this abstract knowledge of barebones facts. It’s about wanting to ground the content of our beliefs. It’s about being able to orient our lives, our habits, the ways that we interact with others, based on these otherwise barebones facts. 

It’s not enough to just know these statistics. You have to do something about it – and that’s what SAAM is really about and why I think this article belongs on the lifestyle page. What SAAM seeks to ideally bring about at a cultural level is a lifestyle change in all of us. Knowing what we know, that sexual assault is clearly a problem, what do we do to prevent, to support, to make a difference? 

I’m no expert in the field. But there seem to me to be some very clear ways that we can habituate ourselves into being more conscientious, more aware of the ways in which we can make a direct, practical impact into the lives of survivors of sexual assault and in preventing the perpetuation of a sexual assault. If we are interested in being good human beings, which I think that we all should be interested in being good human beings, then we ought to make an effort to make the necessary lifestyle changes this April to make the world at least a teensy bit better. 

For one thing, I think that there is a tendency to be afraid of the topic of sexual assault, to the detriment of anyone who needs support or resources for sexual assault. It is undoubtedly awful to hear that someone you care about has been hurt and our knee jerk response to this is to try and find a way out of this situation. We may try to minimize some of the damage by claiming that perhaps the situation is not as bad as the person is claiming that it is. Or we may try to deny the situation altogether and tell the person not to talk about it. 

I think this is a rather human response to a scary situation. But if you find it scary to hear about sexual assault, imagine how much scarier it is to be the person who experienced sexual assault. Then imagine how terrifying it is to be utterly alone because everyone around you keeps telling you that it must not have been so bad, or that you should stop talking about it because you’re scaring people. In essence, in trying to protect yourself, you’re isolating someone who has gone through something awful.

You should instead take seriously someone’s subjective experience instead of looking for a way to minimize it or make it less scary. It is what it is – you are not the epistemic authority here, they are. If you feel as though you cannot handle hearing about it, the solution is not to push the victim down.

The solution is to communicate to that person that you do not have the necessary emotional capacity to hear this rather stressful account and then refer them to the proper resources, such as MOCSA’s 24 hour crisis line. There’s no shame in having a limit to the amount of stressful things you can hear – do not overextend yourself as a human being. Do not make the person who is otherwise opening up to you feel as though their subjective experience of something awful is not real. It is real, and it should be taken seriously.

If you are going to listen to someone opening up to you about sexual assault, then I would advise you to take it very seriously. Our interpersonal relations are the ways in which we as human beings ground our sense of selves. If we do not feel as though the other understands us – if we feel alien, or otherwise incomprehensible – that tends to have pretty negative consequences for how we esteem ourselves.

The act of opening up about sexual assault is an act of vulnerability and it is crucial that you use that as a moment of interpersonal bolstering. That means doing all that you can to not judge the other person at all. The simple mantra you can keep in mind to avoid judging someone is the following: sexual assault is not the fault of the person who is the victim of sexual assault. It does not matter whether the person in question was dressed provocatively, or whether they were intoxicated, or whether they acted irresponsibly, whatever that means.

To argue this – which the fact that this needs to be argued is appalling – consider the case of robbery. Would you tell someone whose very fancy house was robbed that they were asking to be robbed because their house was so pretty? Or what if they just so happened to forget to lock up one night because they were really sleepy? Would you berate the homeowner for years for such reckless irresponsibility? If you did, I would say that you’re misunderstanding the concept of robbery and wrongness.

You should focus on the fact that the person was wronged by someone else. The other person is the one who did something wrong by committing an act of robbery. Whether the house is pretty or whether the homeowner was sleepy is strictly irrelevant to the wrongness of robbery. It’s robbery. It’s wrong. The person was wronged. End of story.

I imagine that the parallel between sexual assault is clear enough. I think that if we keep these two things in mind, we can start making important changes in our lifestyles interpersonally based on our beliefs about sexual assault such that we can come to lead better lives. Good, human, social lives which help others to meet their needs. 

This article hardly covers the amount of work that anyone can and should put in to improve themselves this month to raise awareness of and prevent sexual assault. Thus, dear reader, I encourage you to take this piece as a potential starting point for your continued lived inquiry and continue down the path of becoming a better human being by constantly engaging with difficult questions, even when it is not the officially designated time of SAAM. 

Every Friday this month, members from the two offices have hosted a table in the Yates-Gill Union during Jewell Time to provide information about SAAM, including how to help those who have been sexually assaulted and how to prevent sexual assault. In addition to handing out teal, teal being the official color for SAAM, ribbons to spread awareness on campus, they are providing information about upcoming events.

One of these events, held Monday, was an open dialogue with Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault (MOCSA). The conversation covered topics of sexual violence on college campuses, myths and facts about sexual violence and assault and how to intervene as a bystander.

The national theme for SAAM this year is “Embrace Your Voice.” Building on this, Jewell has adopted the theme of “Jewell Voices,” which can be seen on the banner in the Union surrounded by purple cards.

“We are asking students, as well as the Jewell Community, to voice their desire to stop sexual harassment, change rape culture and support victims on our campus,” said Missy Henry, co-deputy Title IX coordinator and compliance coordinator.

Comments on these cards range from a few words to short paragraphs. These include “listen to and support victims,” “alcohol is never a good excuse,” “no means no,” “I will speak up and call out sexual assault” and “be the person they can ‘go’ to.”

Missy Henry by Cassie Hayes.

The cards will be displayed for the entire month. Henry hopes that individuals will take time to read the words of their peers and take comfort in how they’re being supported on campus and what other students are going to do to help prevent sexual assault.

“I think the Jewell Voices campaign has been received with a really positive response. We’ve had people very willing and excited to put that out,” said Dr. Tricia Hager, director of Counseling Services. “For us, it’s taking that forward and trying to keep that visibility for next year.”

The last event of the month is Denim Day. Students are encouraged to wear denim April 25 and be in a picture after chapel on the Quad at 10:45 a.m. Denim Day started in Italy in 1999 after the Italian Supreme Court ruled that “because the victim wore very, very tight jeans, she had to help him remove them, and by removing the jeans it was no longer rape but consensual sex.” This became known as the “jeans alibi” and sparked a protest by women in the Italian Parliament, who wore jeans to work. Patti Occhiuzzo Giggans, Executive Director of Peace Over Violence, helped bring this idea to the U.S. The first Denim Day was in April of 1999 in Los Angeles and has been held nationwide every year since.  

Hager and Henry both emphasized that they want more visual awareness with events like the ribbon campaign, Jewell Voices and Denim Day.

Dr. Tricia Hager by Cassie Hayes.

To do this, they have planned or are in the planning stages of multiple events for next year. One of these will be a screening of the documentary “The Hunting Ground.”  

“It is [about] stories of survivors of sexual assault and how they’ve become advocates and they work through different college campuses throughout the nation,” said Henry. “They tell their story from when it happened, what their experience was with Title IX on their campus, what happened as a result of that. I had the opportunity to watch it a couple of months ago and I think that’s going to be very powerful for students to see.”

Hager spoke about the potential to bring either the Clothesline project or the “What were you wearing?” exhibit to campus.

“Both of those projects, really the focus is to reduce victim blaming and the stigma around sexual violence and to show that what you were wearing has nothing to do with the fact you were assaulted,” said Hager. “I had the privilege of being able to actually see the ‘What were you wearing?’ exhibit a couple of weeks ago. It’s very powerful [to] see the images and the clothing of what these individuals were wearing, both men and women of all ages, when they were assaulted.”

Moving forward, the two hope to have some type of monthly programming. Assisted by programming from a student committee.

“Since we’ve been at the table during Jewell Time, we have had students approach, who are either already MOCSA volunteers or they’re just interested in this, so we are going to try to form a committee of interested students who want to bring things to campus or who have ideas to get their input and approach it from a student and staff perspective…that’s part of the purple card initiative, we really want to know what the students are thinking, how do they feel, what are their ideas and then work with them to create programming,” said Henry.

Hager hopes the committee can assist with programming beyond sexual assault awareness.

“My goal would be that we would expand the committee out to any awareness and mental health programming,” she said. “That would be a way we could get some student feedback on what are the things that students want us to put programs on for…whether that be a tabling event, putting some information out there, bringing in a speaker…I think this might fill part of the piece that we are missing in getting that student input.”

Cover photo courtesy of National Sexual Violence Research Center. 

For some reason, the majority of this campus doesn’t understand that we have just as big of a problem with sexual assault as do the big state schools. Just having a small population doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen here at Jewell. In fact, to my knowledge, it occurs at a frighteningly high frequency in comparison to other schools.

I’m so happy with the fact that the school is carrying out the activities of SAAM that last year’s Pryor Legacy Class began. It looks like the beginning of a long and winding road for this school to become more aware of what happens on our campus. But just dedicating the month of April to sexual assault awareness doesn’t mean that we have suddenly become perfect. There’s still so much to do.

I’m ready for people to take off their blinders and face the reality of what we are dealing with. There are few things that compare to the pain that one feels when he or she has been sexually assaulted by someone considered to be a peer and has to continue to see this person every single day. Victims exist and live on this campus, just the same as predators exist and live on this campus.

We need to foster an environment in which victims feel like they can come forward and be surrounded by love and support. We need a population of students who will no longer stand for the silence that we continue to hold on this subject. I no longer want this to be a place where women feel unsafe walking into their own dorms at night or going to a fraternity house on the weekend. We should be doing more to ensure the safety of every single student and to hold everyone accountable to the values we claim to have.

Honestly, I feel like if somebody says that he or she was assaulted, there should be no speculation as to whether or not that happened. Victims should immediately be provided with support, but many victims don’t have that support and don’t feel like they would have it if they came forward with their stories.

I think some people are so blissfully ignorant towards rape culture and sexual assault on college campuses because they think it could never happen to them; therefore, they have nothing to worry about. The reality is quite the opposite, and I think we would all be more sympathetic and supportive if we put ourselves in the perspective of those who have experienced something as horrible as sexual assault.

I think that if we all get on the same page, as a college and as a community, we can make the biggest impact in preventing sexual assault. I think that sexual assault education courses or Title IX refreshers would be beneficial. Outlining what kind of behavior is okay and not okay may help people learn to respect others just because they are people.

In addition, I think there should be more open and direct contact with the students about the counseling services provided here on campus. Banishing the stigma attached to mental trauma due to sexual assault would likely make people more willing to find help if they are sexually assaulted.

I hope to see some of these changes occur on campus next semester and truly urge anyone needing help to reach out and find support.