Madison Shumway
Life Editor
Last summer, a group of ISU student-athletes envisioned a week of events that would spotlight the problem of campus sexual assault and start a discussion about its prevention. What they imagined was a march across campus, a keynote speech and basketball games where players would wear teal and purple jerseys.
Then, sexual assault became the focus of a national conversation.
#MeToo trended on Twitter, allowing survivors of sexual violence to share their experiences publicly. Politicians, writers and media moguls lost their jobs in response and events like the Golden Globes functioned as their own sexual assault awareness campaigns.
Jen McCaw, a former ISU soccer player and co-president of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, the group heading up Sexual Assault Awareness Week, said the group had unwittingly planned the events in the middle of a cultural conversation about sexual violence.
“It just so happened that all of this stuff was coming up in the news,” McCaw said. “It really adds to the importance of our awareness week, I think. We didn’t plan for it to be like this, but it’s a hot topic.”
The week runs January 22-27. Students can sign a pledge against sexual assault and physical violence throughout the week.
SAAC, partnered with ISU Housing, will kick off the series of events with Sex in the Dark in the Rendezvous Planetarium Monday night. Housing hosts the informational forum each year.
Attendees can gather in the dark planetarium and ask questions about sex, the dimmed lighting aimed to encourage candor and prevent embarrassment.
Noelle Johansen, the developer of focused consent training at Boise State University, said sexual education of this kind is key to preventing sexual assault.
“When students understand bodily autonomy, respect and the consequences that follow sexual assault, they’re more likely to take it into account for their personal lives,” she said. “In order to understand something and apply it to one’s life, education is the first step.”
Tuesday of Sexual Assault Awareness week features Green Dot training, a bystander intervention course hosted regularly by the Gender Resource Center. Green Dot emphasizes the role bystanders play in preventing bullying, violence and sexual assault.
Johansen, a longtime advocate for sexual assault survivors, praises the effectiveness of specialized bystander intervention training. Previous sex education or consent training videos prove ineffective at preventing sexual assault, she said.
Instead, she suggests focused trainings that teach intervention skills and stress the importance of consent.
“Consent is about more than not saying no,” Johansen said. “Consent requires enthusiastic, ongoing, freely given, and specific permission throughout the entire sexual activity … Basically, consent is about respecting another person’s bodily autonomy and recognizing that they have the right to say no at any point.”
Other consent advocates may join SAAC on Wednesday for its March Against Sexual Assault.
Marchers will gather at Reed Gym before heading to Davis Field and tying a symbolic ribbon to the fence.
The route emphasizes the role of ISU student-athletes in the sexual assault conversation, but McCaw describes the march as unifying for the community.
“It’s a bringing-together event,” she said. “It’s a movement: people joining together for this cause.”
It’s SAAC’s hope that in coming together at the week’s events, the ISU community will set the expectation that sexual violence is not tolerated on campus.
The group borrows this language from Brenda Tracy, the rape-survivor-turned-activist who will speak at the PSUB ballroom on Thursday.
After speaking up in 2014 about her 1998 assault by four men, three of them college football players, Tracy launched her Set The Expectation campaign.
It’s aimed at changing campus culture that allows athletes to receive slaps on the wrist while their victims must shoulder the trauma of their assault.
Tracy’s activism has provided a framework for Sexual Assault Awareness week. Other schools have hosted Set the Expectation games, with players wearing purple and teal.
ISU will join their ranks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, when the men’s tennis and men’s basketball teams will don teal and purple t-shirts during warm-ups. Announcements at halftime and timeouts will explain the campaign to spectators.
SAAC’s goal, McCaw said, is to contribute to the conversation about sexual assault.
“It’s a culture,” she said. “The expectation is that it should never happen.”
