Earlier in September, Rho Bashe posted videos on her social media pages showing her injuries after a man threw a brick at her face after she did not give him her number. She details her story in these videos that went viral across many social media platforms and have sparked a new conversation regarding violence against women and protection for women.
“What have I ever done to anybody in my life to deserve this,” Bashe said on her social media. “I have never done anything in my life to hurt anybody. Literally, a man asked me for my number and I said, ‘No.’ And he picked up a brick, in front of so many men, and was like, ‘What are you going to do?’”
This situation has started up a conversation that has been on-going for years. Sexual harassment and violence is a prevalent issue for women across the world. In June 2014, the Stop Street Harassment organization commissioned a national survey in the United States that found that 65% of all women had experienced street harassment.
Surveys done by Cornell University ILR school and the nonprofit organization Hollaback! show that 85% of American female respondents faced street harassment before the age of 18, nearly 70% before the age of 14 and close to 80% have stated they were followed by their harassers.
With women of all ages having experiences like these, there have been federal efforts for prevention down to the local level. In Milledgeville and at GC, there are many active efforts to help women facing harassment and violence.
The Women’s Center on campus hosts a variety of support for students, like the Project BRAVE initiative, standing for Bobcats Rising Against Violence Everywhere.
“We received grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women, the campus grant program from the Department of Justice,” said Jennifer Graham, Associate Dean of Students for Student Inclusion and Belonging. “We have received it twice, first in 2013 and renewed in 2016, and through that funding, we started Project BRAVE. We train peer facilitators all throughout campus for bystander intervention, consent, stalking, they do classroom presentations and prevention education.”
Through the grants, the Women’s Center has engaged in efforts like direct victim services and has previously provided advocacy for students. There are active efforts against violence supporting victims in Milledgeville, like The Bright House, a sexual assault support center that opened in 2019. Another effort has been raising awareness of these issues and the resources that the Women’s Center provides.
“Every fall semester, we participate in the Clothesline Project, a national visual awareness campaign raising awareness about different forms of violence, but it also provides people who have been impacted by power based interpersonal violence an opportunity to speak out,” Graham said. “We invite survivors or people who have been impacted by violence to come out and make a shirt and we hang all of them across front campus. We invite people to share their experience to find community with other people and find a way to talk about it because we don’t really talk about it in our society.”
Break the Silence will be taking place during the week of Oct. 23 this semester. Additionally, during the spring, April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, where the Women’s Center hosts Take Back the Night, a rally that offers survivors an opportunity to speak out. Along with their awareness programs, they offer consistent support with connecting people to the Bright House, the Counseling Center on campus, get people connected to Title IX, offer community building, engagement and leadership development for women.
In conversation of harassment and consent, there remains the question of how can we solve this?
“It’s not something that is talked about, and it becomes a perpetuating cycle of not talking about it,” Graham said. “We, as a society, are not comfortable talking about sex, which makes it really hard to talk about consent. Sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination happens all the time. A lot of socialization and the way gender is talked about in society, misogyny is a part of that. The patriarchy contributes too.”
There has been an increase in conversation around consent, with the importance of teaching it at a younger age becoming more prevalent in our society.
“I’m excited when I hear my peers talk about the conversations they’re having with their children around consent and really starting consent conversations from a young age, starting those conversations when they’re toddlers, because consent isn’t just something that happens when we do or don’t want to have sex,” Graham said. “Do you consent to holding hands? Do you consent to getting a kiss? Do you consent to getting a hug? Those are very age-appropriate conversations that we have to have with kids so it’s not a new concept that you’re being introduced to in middle or high school.”
At the federal level, acts like the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, and the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, sends support directly into communities. These are dollars that are collected at a federal level then are redistributed out to states, coalitions and different government agencies to help money get closest to where things are happening and where it is most needed.
“I’m always glad when VAWA gets reauthorized,” Graham said. “There were a couple years where it didn’t. We, as a campus, have directly benefited from VAWA because we have received two cycles of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women funding. Those grant funds go directly into communities. They help fund campus programs across the nation. They help to fund sexual assault centers and domestic violence shelters and state coalitions that are doing this work, so that funding is tremendous and helping.”
While the ongoing conversation of harassment and consent continues, there remains support for those who face these issues on a federal to a local level, including on campus.
