It's On Us Committee Focuses Efforts on Preventing Sexual Assault on Campus Monday, September 16, 2024
“Sexual assault is a very taboo topic to a lot of people. I wanted to make it a more normalized conversation people can have.” That’s the vision of Maegen Steiner, president of the brand-new It’s On Us student organization at Point Park.
Point Park received a $40,000 grant from It’s On Us, a national organization designed to combat campus sexual assault. While the University has received this grant before, this is the first year of the student organization, which will head up the outreach efforts, planning activities such as the kick-off event, “Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll,” which took place during Welcome Week.
“I’m really excited about bringing It's on Us back to campus,” Steiner, a senior biological sciences major, said. “I’ve been thinking about doing it for a long time, and I know it existed in some capacity or another, but this is going to be the year it has a bigger prevalence and is more student-focused than it’s ever been.”
Vice President Grey Dixon, a senior psychology major with a focus in community, joins Steiner. “This is something I care about more than anything,” Dixon said. “I think we can make a huge difference and make a more holistic experience for students.”
Steiner and Dixon are partnering closely with Student Government Association President Kyle MacLaughlin and Vice President Dillion Peterson. For MacLaughlin and Peterson, it’s a natural fit.
We made it a big goal to focus on safety for groups of students who may not always get the support they feel they require,” MacLaughlin said.
“Prevention and protection of our students is obviously a huge thing for us,” Peterson said. “We also have the position to intervene for students in administrative ways. We want to be sure the situation is handled in a way that is beneficial to our students who are going through this.”
All of these student leaders are open about their own experiences with sexual assault. It’s why they’re taking on this difficult issue with such passion and energy.
They’re supported by Rebecca Harper, director of Health Services, and Cassandra Moffat, Ph.D., director of Counseling Services, who co-wrote the grant application and oversee the program.
Through events such as Cookies for Consent and Pretzels for Prevention, the It’s On Us committee hopes to raise awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses and teach students how to prevent it, including stepping in as a bystander. The RedZone webpage is dedicated to teaching about the time between move-in and Thanksgiving break when students are most vulnerable and over 50% of sexual assaults on campus take place.
Pizza and Personal Safety events will give students lessons in self-defense. Other events will focus on how sexual assault might affect specific groups, such as LGBTQ and disabled students.
Meanwhile, events such as LGBTQ Date Nights and the Swiftie Healthy Relationship Event focus instead on prevention by developing healthy relationships.
Harper says healthy relationships are the foundation of everything else in the prevention of sexual assault. Over the last 2-3 years, she and Moffat have noticed that students don’t have as much education around relationships generally as they have in the past.
They've also seen a disparity in the sex education students have received in high school based on where they attended. “They don’t even know how to have those hard conversations in a relationship,” Harper said.
Since students come here from all sorts of backgrounds, Moffat says that the goal is to reach first-year students as soon as they arrive: “We want to start at the beginning as soon as they get here for them to understand what we’re trying to do.”
Some students who have experienced assault have shared that they didn’t know where to go for help. Both students and administrators agree that it’s critical to clearly and frequently communicate what a student’s options are in the case of an assault.
“We want to make students understand they have multiple options in the case of a sexual assault,” Harper said. “The Title IX office is your legal team, but if you’re looking for someone to advocate for you and offer support, you can come to me in the Student Health Center, to the Counseling Center, and to PAAR.”
And now, victims of sexual assault can also go to It’s On Us and SGA leadership.
“It’s critical that survivors have their peer support,” Peterson said. “We want people to know that as student leaders, we are people that are willing to talk about this.”
“Without things like this, without seeing that there are people looking to speak up for you, there’s an isolation to it and a feeling that you don’t have an outlet,” MacLaughlin said. “It doesn’t end when you’re done with the school process or legal process. It’s a larger issue. So it’s important to cultivate that culture and have people in student leadership positions who survivors know they can reach out to for support or and reach out to if they need that next step in their journey.”
“We’re the perfect example of your life doesn’t stop after it happens,” Dixon said. “We’ve been through it and we’re coming back and talking about it and improving campus. We see you, we know what you’ve been through and we're working towards stopping it.”
Headshots by Natalie Caine '24