Downtown event puts focus on Sexual Assault Awareness Month
Emphasis placed on college campuses
Victims’ advocates highlighted the need for preventing sexual assaults on college campuses as part of an event Friday to recognize April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
As many as one in five women and one in 16 men will be sexually assaulted while attending college — usually in their freshman or sophomore year — but about 90 percent of those crimes are never reported, according to officials of the Center for Victims. Assailants often receive little or no punishment from their schools, advocates said.
“Think about that when you are sending your daughters and sons off to college — that they have a good experience,” said the center’s chief program officer, Tracey Provident, at the Downtown event at Market Square. “Not just a great education but a good experience.”
The advocacy group provides a 24-hour crisis hotline, victims’ rights information, legal support, counseling, emergency shelter and transitional housing, and help obtaining protection from abuse orders, among other services. The group also sponsors a program called Men Ending
Violence, which engages more men in efforts to prevent and end violence against women.
The group received a $75,000 donation during the event from Verizon Wireless, which has refurbished and distributed 11 million donated cell phones to victims’ shelters since beginning the Hopeline Program in 2000, according to Mark Frazier, president of the region covering Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
To help keep women and men from being abused, colleges should follow the recommendations contained in a White House task force report called “Not Alone” that was issued last year, said Ben Wecht, program administrator of The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University.
“College campuses are one of the battlegrounds on which this war is being fought,” he said at the Center for Victims event.
The report recommended that colleges provide victims with confidentiality when reporting and discussing sexual assault with on-campus counselors, obtain specialized training to understand how such assaults occur and how victims respond, improve their investigative and enforcement systems, and reach out to community organizations and especially rape crisis centers for help.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is now investigating more than 150 schools for possible sexual-assault-related violations of Title IX, the federal anti-discrimination law that protects collegiate sexual assault victims, according to the institute.