Head-turning campaign addresses assault on campus

“Prevention starts with challenging victim-blaming and believing survivors when they disclose,” said Cherilyn Nederhiser, lead Public Safety officer for MHCC, in her letter to the editor in last week’s issue of the Advocate. That’s exactly what Goodby Silverstein & Partners and production company Prettybird hoped to accomplish when they took out an ad in The Harvard Crimson – Harvard University’s student newspaper.

The ad, which was specifically released around the time high school students would be receiving their actual acceptance notice, pictures an unnamed college acceptance letter that starts out with the typical congratulations, “You have been accepted,” but then takes a sharp turn into “We’re sorry that one of these (future) memories will include being raped by someone you thought you could trust.”

April is deemed Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the goal was to capitalize on that, and hopefully start a conversation before the next new school year, since the majority of sexual assault happens during the first six weeks of a student’s tenure, reports show. The campaign is also heavy on social media: see DontAcceptRape.com or the hashtag, #DontAcceptRape.

The campaign also features a series of students reading these letters aloud, on video.

Some might say this approach is shocking, and it is, but not reprehensible. Greeting a survivor’s account with incredulity is just as bad as telling that person it was probably bound to happen, and this ad campaign says it in no unclear terms: “After all, you can’t expect us to expel someone on the basis of a story that starts with ‘I had been drinking,’ ” reads the fictional administrative letter.

Recent events at Tualatin High School outside of Portland show students’ concerns echo that of Silverstein & Partners. The high school found itself in some hot water after students formed a web forum titled “Girls with Guts” that said some faculty members did not take student survivors’ reports seriously. By not believing survivors, administrations are pretending on some level that this is an unsolvable problem, but, “we can, and we are” going to achieve a solution to sexual violence, Nederhiser predicted.

And, some of the best ways to do that are simply practical. Have a conversation about sexual assault on campus – it hasn’t gone away for a good long while, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get rid of it immediately. An ad campaign, especially one designed to encourage conversation, is the exact right way to address this topic, because if one in five women in America experiencing sexual assault while in college isn’t shocking enough, it’s clearly time to up the ante.