Student organizations on campus get an early start on spreading awareness about sexual assault and harassment.
College women are most vulnerable to rape during the first few weeks of their freshman and sophomore years.
This statistic from the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center is what prompted Benjamin Braddock, the graduate assistant for Sexual Assault Prevention and Relationship Violence Risk Reduction for the Office of Health Promotion, to find a way to promote awareness of sexual assault as soon as possible.
“Better Bystanders had had a chalking campaign over the summer,” Braddock said. “They would go out and write tips on what to do in certain situations. A lot of students want to help but don’t know what they could do.”
Better Bystanders is an organization that strives to empower the OU community on how to intervene and become an active bystander.
Daniel Parsons, the president of Better Bystanders, said in an email the idea of chalking the campus came from a desire for the messages to be as widely seen as possible.
“The idea with the chalk campaign was to get these bystander tips out there so that students knew about them,” Parsons, a senior studying mechanical engineering, said in an email. “The strategies are fairly simple, but unless people frequently think about bystander intervention, these options don’t always come to mind instantly.”
These two organization worked with POWER/GAMMA and they created a pervasive sexual harassment prevention campaign called “Chalk the Walk.”
POWER/GAMMA is a network that aims to provide peer-facilitated health programming to the Ohio University community.
“We wanted to make sure that we made a statement that everyone should feel safe on campus,” Braddock said. “We thought that was a very powerful message, and we were hoping that we could kind of set the tone for the year.”
Anushka Gole said she saw some buzz on Facebook about the campaign and was interested in seeing more organizations try to engage students in this discussion.
“I honestly don’t think there’s been enough widespread talk about (preventing harassment),” Gole, a second-year graduate student studying communication development, said.
According to Braddock, the campaign would not have had the success it did without the promotion and volunteers of many different organizations including: the Women’s Center, the LGBT Center, the Black Student Cultural Programming Board, F--k Rape Culture and Feminist Equality Movement.
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Braddock said chalking is just their first step toward creating an assault free environment.
Braddock said there is a tip and poster campaign that started last week. The posters provide instructions on what can be done to intervene with sexual harassment or assault.
“We also have a workshop that we do for students that teaches them in depth ‘how do you become a better bystander,’ and we want to reach out to anyone who is interested in developing those skills,” Braddock said.
The workshops are hosted by request and can be given to classes, dorms or other organizations.
“Getting everything organized took a good deal of effort and commitment, but we received an amazing amount of support from so many people, organizations, and offices at Ohio University,” Parsons said in an email.
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