Sorry to just throw links at you today, folks. It’s been a busy week. But I do want to highlight some stories I’ve been collecting from campus newspapers. There is good stuff coming out of Haverford, Temple University, Princeton, and Boston College this week. I’m especially excited about the policy work students are tackling at Temple and Haverford. Right on.
Update: you too, University of Maryland!
Don’t expect much on the blog over the next few days…I think most of us will be busy with Thanksgiving. In the meantime you can spend some time browsing our new site!
But before I go, some college happenings:
Remember the Green Dot Initiative? Well The College of New Jersey is giving it a try. This will be the school’s first bystander training.
At a Princeton University SpeakOut, sexual assault survivors expressed anger and disappointment over the response they received from fellow students and the university. Students were also upset by incidents of public masturbation bring treated like a joke. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s not a joke.
Finally, hats off to Valena Beety! Valena used to be on SAFER’s Board, and recently she was dispensing some important information at Slippery Rock University.
Ann at Feministing and Amanda at The Sexist react to the recanting of a rape accusation at Hofstra University.
Cara speaks eloquently about why we shouldn’t pressure survivors into naming their attackers.
Carnival Against Sexual Violence 78 is up at abyss2hope.
At the AAUW blog, hollykearl writes about the street harassment young girls are subjected to as they walk to and from school. This one speaks to me personally, as I’ve discussed here before that this was the exact kind of harassment that got me involved in feminism and anti-violence issues to begin with.
Things I Love: College blogs! I just learned about feminist blog out of Princeton University, Equal Writes. Tufts University already has the awesome Gender Bender Blog, but this week I also came across the Tufts University Survivors of Rape and Sexual Assault blog. They are doing a great (and disturbing) breakdown of Tuft’s assault policy. If there’s a college blog we should be linking to, leave it in the comments.
Another blog you should be checking out: Where Is Your Line? A new blog “about sex and consent” in association with Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary The Line.
Prevention Connection has a new online presentation up on engaging bystanders in violence prevention.
I haven’t gotten a chance to read it all yet, but this zine made by Paul Brown and “written (mostly) for men about the connections between the construct of masculinity, rape culture, and mainstream pornography” looks pretty interesting.
Enjoy the weekend, and happy new year to all my fellow Jews…
My boyfriend pointed out this article in the NYTimes, which discusses what Princeton is doing and not doing with the its truly enormous endowment:
But the committee rejected a request to expand the budget for sexual harassment and assault advising, judging substance-abuse counseling a higher priority. It also nixed free towel service in the gym, weekend cleaning of social spaces in the graduate college and a project assistant to handle the library’s Latin American Ephemera collection.
The lack of a free towel service I can get behind, but really, with an endowment of $2.2 million per student, they can’t afford to expand their sexual assault program? Particularly in light of the op-ed I wrote about yesterday and the lawsuit they are currently facing, which alleges that Princeton was “grossly negligent” in supervising the eating club where the assault took place, if I was a Princeton student I’d be very concerned about why the spending committee doesn’t think more sexual assault prevention is needed.
Princeton has been sued over a rape alleged to have occurred during the selection process for one of their eating clubs (roughly comparable to fraternity/sorority rushes). This amazing op-ed takes the campus to task for the ways the news of the suit has been responded to by other students on campus.
Instead of discussing how the environment on campus may be a dangerous one that leaves students vulnerable to sexual assault, on-campus discussion questions the legitimacy of the lawsuit and the monetary compensation involved.
In other words, it’s been the same old blame the victim/survivors are liars out for money story that gets replayed for every high profile rape case. Lady Adjepong’s response is right on the money,
We do not know why this young lady came forward now. What we do know is that survivors are too often doubted, ridiculed and made to relive the trauma of an abuse again, simply because of the community’s reaction. Instead of perpetrating this standard of re-abusing, let us examine the factors that facilitate assault. What can we do to eliminate the occurrence of sexual violence on our campus?
Any allegation of rape should be a call for a campus to re-evaluate itself and its culture, not a reason to start covering their own asses and tossing out allegations of their own to deflect their responsibility. Owning up to your mistakes is hard for individuals and for groups, but I hope that many Princeton students will take Adjepong up on her offer to join their Take Back the Night this Friday, and see this lawsuit as a change to bring more safety and more justice to their campus.
