Laura Pezzini
lpezzini@mustangdaily.net
Heightened sensitivity to sexual assault at Cal Poly following several alleged incidents over the past few years has led local organizations to join forces with Start by Believing, an international campaign focused on improving public response to sexual assault this month.
The purpose of Start by Believing is to create a safe environment for victims of sexual assault to talk about their experience, according to its website. The name itself explains its mission — to make sure that victims are heard and sexual assault is not made light of.
The Sexual Assault Recovery and Prevention Center (SARP) of San Luis Obispo became involved with Start by Believing first and began working on its local campaign.
“We have brochures distributing all over the county wherever people might see them,” SARP Executive Director Jennifer Adams said. “It explains the importance of that initial reaction when someone is told that another has been sexually assaulted or raped, and the first thing is to believe them. That has a lasting impact on whether that person will report the incident.”
Adams said SARP will also use a billboard to aid in the campaign, along with partnering with police departments in San Luis Obispo County cities.
Safer, Cal Poly’s own sexual assault recovery resource, is involved with the campaign by heading up its on-campus presence.
“It is a county public awareness campaign, but Safer is really instigating getting housing involved, getting athletics involved, getting greeks involved, all of Student Life and Leadership,” Safer and the Gender Equity Center coordinator Christina Kaviani said.
Safer has a number of methods planned to get the word out about Start by Believing. The first of these focuses on getting the students involved in social media for the campaign by changing their Facebook profile picture.
“We are going to be doing lots of different efforts, mainly trying to get people to change their Facebook profile pictures (on Feb. 1),” Kaviani said.
The profile image is one which depicts the user’s pledge to never brush off the idea of a potential sexual assault.
“If someone has been raped, if someone has been assaulted, we are vowing that ‘I’m going to start by believing,’” Kaviani said.
In addition, Safer is planning on hosting an awareness event in the University Union plaza on Valentine’s Day and maintaining a presence at the production of the Vagina Monologues this month.
This comes in the wake of two years in which sexual assault numbers at Cal Poly were slightly higher than usual. According to the University Police Department’s (UPD) crime statistics, both 2010 and 2011 had one confirmed incident of sexual assault each, as opposed to none in 2009. UPD Chief George Hughes, however, said the number of incidents has stayed the same overall.
“We haven’t had any this year, but that doesn’t mean sexual assault isn’t occurring on campus,” Hughes said. “If it comes up in the crime stats, that means that it was reported to us and that we were able to confirm that there was a sexual assault.”
Hughes said many incidents of sexual assault go unreported, or at least unreported to law enforcement agencies.
“If you talk to the SARP Center I think you would see that a lot of incidents are reported to them instead of us,” Hughes said. “It’s a crime that often goes unreported for several reasons.”
UPD also supports the efforts of Start by Believing, SARP and Safer, and plans to do whatever is necessary to promote the campaign’s cause.
“We were informed of the campaign at the same time as all the other county law enforcement offices were, and we do support the campaign,” Hughes said.
According to Kaviani, a campaign of this type is important not only because of the existence of sexual assault on campus, but because having a safe environment for people to report incidents can lead to a lower number of sexual assaults.
“The average rapist rapes six times, so if you get people to feel like they can report, you can potentially eliminate five other rapes,” Kaviani said. “After the rapist rapes once, then that person who is the victim or the survivor feels safe in talking about it and it can be prevented in the future.”
Kaviani said that a campaign of this type is especially important for college students, and that as a counselor, she often hears stories of victims not being believed by their peers.
“I hear a lot of Cal Poly students victim blaming and not believing their friends,” Kaviani said. “There’s lots of psychological reasons for that. Lots of times no one wants to think one of their friends would ever do something like this and no one wants to think that it would ever happen to them.”
Adams said SARP is excited to partner with Cal Poly and that she hopes the campaign will have a lasting impact on campus.
“This campaign is a great way to get people involved,” Adams said. “Oftentimes, people can feel really helpless but this gives people a really tangible thing to do — to start by believing.”