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AMANDA DEDIE
News Editor
Imagine walking down the street, feeling fierce. You’ve got your favorite outfit on, you look amazing, and you’re ready to hang out with some friends and have a great time. Cars are whizzing by you, but you pay no mind. Then someone rolls a window down, and the passenger inside the car screams at you, “slut!”
It’s instances such as these, and more, that inspired V-Day — the campus branch of a global activist movement that seeks to end violence against women and girls — at Fredonia to hold what is called a “Slut Walk.”
The idea for Fredonia’s Slut Walk was inspired by an incident in Toronto — and many others like it — where a Toronto Police Service representative told college girls that they should “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
Last Thursday, around 50 Fredonia students gathered in front of the Williams Center, wearing a wide array of clothing types and holding protest signs with sayings such as “Feminists Unite” and “We Claim the Night.” The idea was to spread awareness to that fact that the clothing that a person is or is not wearing does not imply consent of any kind.
The walk made its way around Ring Road, starting at the Williams Center and ending at the clock tower, where speeches were made and poems were read. The entire time, the group had to be escorted by University Police.
Kaitlin Cox, a junior history major said, “There’s a lot of people there offering to have sex with people at the slut walk, rape people at the slut walk … it’s a little bit scary. But at least it’s out there, and people are recognizing it.” Cox is also the public relations chair and event coordinator for V-Day at Fredonia.
Fran Rodenell, a class of ‘05 Fredonia alumna, attended the Slut Walk. As a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault, the protest — and the reasons behind it — hit close to home.
“My now ex-husband beat the shit out of me, and the police officer looked at me and asked, ‘What did you do?’ So that angered me then and that angers me now,” said Rodenell. “When I see young ladies being sexually assaulted or just harassed because they choose to dress in a way that makes them feel beautiful … it angers me because there have been threats regarding this walk. We have to have police escort us because of those threats, and it’s absolutely absurd.”
According to Women Organized Against Rape, a nonprofit in Philadelphia that works to eliminate all forms of sexual violence:
- one in three American women will be sexually abused during their lifetime
- one in four women and one in six men will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18
- In 2002, 247,730 people were raped/sexually assaulted in the U.S., according to a National Crime Victimization Survey
- Only 54 percent of those rapes and sexual assaults were reported to the police.
- Every two minutes, someone somewhere in America is sexually violated.”
When the group ended at the clock tower, the organizers of the event gathered to say some inspiring words, and Meagan Griffin, a senior majoring in molecular genetics and minoring in Spanish, read a slam poem from the Rutgers University slam poetry team titled, “The Rape Poem to End All Rape Poems.”
“[The poem] kind of just talks about how people complain about these sorts of issues, but we wouldn’t have to speak up about them if people would change the way they lived our culture and encouraged respect of other people,” said Griffin.
The comments seen by those on Yik Yak and other forms of social media led the group to fight even harder for its beliefs, pointing out that the protest is even more necessary.
“We had some interesting comments afterwards. People on Yik Yak were criticizing not only what we were doing, but a lot of people’s bodies, and saying how some of the girls shouldn’t take their clothes off like that because they weren’t thin or pretty enough to be doing that. It was really hurtful,” said Griffin.
The negativity won’t keep V-Day at Fredonia away next year.
“It surprises me that so many people on campus responded that way, because I feel like we’re such an open-minded campus, and people are very understanding about these issues,” Griffin said. “So the amount of negative responses we got shocked me, and I think it just proves even more why we need to do this and even do it again next year.”