My freshman year of college at the University of Utah, I worked in the newest freshman residence hall and lived in an older building near the top of campus. I would often work the 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday night shift at my job, which left me walking around campus alone in the dark. I found myself looking over my shoulder, clutching my bright blue pepper spray — a welcome-to-college gift from my parents — and speed walking the brightly lit path lined with multiple blue-light safety phones.
The emotion that I felt most strongly on these walks was fear.
Also during my freshman year at the U., a first-year international student named Zhifan Dong was murdered by her boyfriend in an off-campus motel, continuing a devastating legacy of university-affiliated women being killed by current or past intimate or dating partners (see Lauren McCluskey, Dr. Sarah Hawley and MacKenzie Lueck).
As a woman, I received constant messaging growing up to be vigilant. The world was painted as a scary, dangerous place with criminals hiding in the bushes and at every empty TRAX station ready to attack and sexually violate young women.
A lot of the time, when we think of violence, we think of cases that match the perception that I was given growing up — strangers violently attacking pretty young women walking alone in a dark part of town.
Our prevention efforts largely line up with this misperception. Women are given tips and tricks to prevent their own victimization. We’re sold self-defense classes, keychains that can be used as weapons and scrunchies that turn into drink covers. Bystander intervention is the name of the game, in which we shift the responsibility for preventing harm from the people directly involved to individuals in the same vicinity.
Yet, sexual violence happens most often between people who know each other, in private. Couples. Friends. Peers. Dating partners. Classmates. Nationally, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape. This rate is even higher in the state of Utah.
Zhifan’s, Lauren’s, Sarah’s and MacKenzie’s murders would not have been, and were not, prevented by fear-mongering messaging that tells women not to walk alone and to carry pepper spray, or the presence of a brightly lit path with blue-light safety phones yards apart.
Despite this reality, the current state of popular sexual violence prevention caters more to creating an artificial sense of safety than genuinely stopping violence.
At best, these efforts are ineffective — what individual is brandishing their knife key chain when watching a movie with their partner? At worst, they blame the victim — how could you have let yourself been raped? Were you watching how much you were drinking?
It’s not a bad thing to engage in behaviors that make people feel safe, like carrying pepper spray or calling someone when walking alone at night. Yet, we also need to recognize that these efforts alone will not end sexual violence.
We desire to feel safe when we are with our friends and our partners. It is far easier to fear the dark unknown than acknowledge that the people who are causing harm are just that: people. People that we know, love and care about. In fact, research tells us that about 1 in 7 college men have committed acts that meet the legal definition of sexual assault.
Traditional prevention efforts leave out a vital figure: the person who is causing the harm. When we fail to acknowledge the reality that people who cause harm are not shadowy, criminal figures, we fail to truly prevent harm. Prevention starts with changing the beliefs and behaviors of individuals. We are each capable of causing harm, just as we are each capable of preventing harm, starting with interrogating our own beliefs and socializations around sex, sexuality and sexual violence.
We need to stop our collective overreliance on quick fixes for violence that place the responsibility on potential victims. Instead, let’s reflect on, learn about and educate others on the roles we each play in ending harm. It takes each of us.
(Tillie Powell) Tillie Powell is a master's of social work student at the University of Utah, and the graduate assistant at the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention.
Tillie Powell is a master’s of social work student at the University of Utah, and the graduate assistant at the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention.
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