Author: Damian Mendieta
Project S.A.F.E. organized Take Back the Month to bring attention to April as sexual assault awareness month. Previously known as Take Back the Night, and later Take Back the Week, the event has expanded to maximize student turnout, according to Project S.A.F.E. programming assistants (PAs) Fátima Avellan (senior) and Audrey Logan (senior). The members of Project S.A.F.E. intend to spread awareness of sexual assault and rape through workshops, film screenings and community-building dialogues.
Organizers aim to use Take Back the Month to highlight the marginalization of certain survivor groups, according to Avellan. Among those groups represented will be women of color, members of the LGBTQ community and male survivors of sexual violence. An increased number of workshops, activities, screenings and speakers this year have an increased focus on marginalized groups at Occidental.
Director Aishah Simmons will give the keynote address on April 22 in the Dumke Commons, following a screening of her film “No! The Rape Documentary.” Simmons will be on campus the entire day preceding the screening and may have a chance to meet with student leaders, faculty and administrators for lunch. “[We would like her] to just lend her experience and expertise to campus in terms of supporting women of color and [the] LGBTQ community,” Alletto said. “Often times those are the communities that are underserved and underreported.”
There will also be displays on sexual violence in the Tiger Cooler for a week, starting April 7. Titled “On the Margins of Sexual Violence,” the event focuses on violence towards women of color, LGBTQ members and men. The displays are meant to raise awareness for identity groups that are not always acknowledged in activism, Avellan and Logan explained.
“I know the poster says we’ll only be focusing on women of color and the LGBTQ community, but we’re now going to incorporate men as well because we think that’s also a population that is sometimes overseen in this issue, and it shouldn’t be that way,” Avellan said. “Those survivors on this campus do exist, and we don’t want to make them feel ignored or excluded.”
Another central concern for Take Back the Month is the way in which survivors are treated when sharing experiences at panels and events. “The act of sharing one’s experience as a survivor can be empowering,” Logan said. “On our end, we’re doing everything we can to make it the safest space for those empowering experiences, and it all kind of comes back to our theme, which is ‘Communities unite, take back the night.’”
In a shift from previous years, PAs gave greater consideration to the intimate nature of survivor testimonials and the privacy of survivors at vigils.For that reason, the Take Back the Night Vigil will include exclusively survivors and invited allies. “In the past people have gone to Take Back the Night Vigil to hear stories, but that’s not really what that’s for,” Avellan said. “The event that that is for is the survivor speaker on April 22nd, and that speaker is specially trained by POV through their Voices Over Violence Program, and that person will be able to educate people who are present at the program about myths and realities about sexual violence.”
To foster greater male participation, Project S.A.F.E adviser and Assistant Director of Intercultural Affairs Dominic Alletto helped organize men’s organizations to put on events during the month, such as a “Men in Solidarity” bystander workshop and a men’s dialogue on masculinity. “Every year [“Men in Solidarity”] focuses on myths and realities in order to engage men and get them thinking critically about how we may participate in a rape culture and how we may combat that,” Alletto said. “[We are] also analyzing our own power in the cycle of violence and how we can play an active role in stopping violence against women and also violence against ourselves.”
A series of related events called “Dirty Talk” will take place on April 8, 10, 16 and 18 in the JSC Quad to educate Occidental community members about sex, consent and healthy communication between partners. Avellan explained that Project S.A.F.E. wanted to foster a community that did not only focus on heavy topics.
“We firmly believe as an organization that sex, when it’s consensual and everyone is on the same page, is excellent,” Logan said.
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