by Dilara Yarbough
“Take Back the Night Week” is part of a national campaign during the month of April, Sexual Assault Awareness Month. This year’s “Take Back the Night” was organized by JustSex, the anti-sexual assault group on-campus. The events included a seminar on how to interpret rape statistics, an anti-sexual assault training for men, a screening of the film Remembering Angela Shelton, and the annual rally and march around the campus and community.
David DeGeest ’06 helped organize the events. He cited the prevalence of sexual assault in Grinnell and around the world, and the silence survivors of sexual assault are often expected to uphold as reasons for hosting Take Back the Night. “This is just such a pervasive part of everyone’s life, and we’re always so silent about it,” he said. “This is the one place and one time that it’s safe to talk about it.”
One of the highlights of the week was an anti-rape training for men put on by male students visiting from Virginia’s College of William and Mary. Grinnell was the fortieth and final school the speakers visited on their nationwide tour. Mark Henry ‘05 attended the event. “They showed us a pretty graphic video, and they were very blunt with statistics and with facts about rape,” he said.
“They tried to touch on just about every aspect of sexual assault from before the incident occurs, to after,” Henry said. Presenters told men how to deal with possible perpetrators as well as victims of rape.
The strategy of men talking to men is “an anomaly in the movement,” said Domestic Violence Alternatives/Sexual Abuse Center intern Helen Carey ’04. “Most of the people in the movement are women.”
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