Greetings from SAFER!

Hello Feministing readers! My name is Sarah, and I’m on the Board of Directors (i.e., one of the volunteer staff members) at Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER). I blog regularly over at SAFER’s blog, and a lot of my posts here at Feministing Campus will be cross-posted from there. That said, let me give you some background on SAFER—who we are, what we’re all about, and what you can expect to see from my posts.

SAFER is a volunteer collective dedicated to supporting students who are trying to impact how their college or university prevents and responds to sexual assault, particularly by changing the school’s sexual assault policy (or policies). In future posts I will discuss our projects in more detail, but the basics are: we offer on-campus trainings for students who are trying to organize sexual assault policy reform campaigns; we have a database of campus sexual assault policies from across the country that we are currently trying to grow via our project with V-Day, the Campus Accountability Project; and we have the Activist Resource Center (ARC), an online library of organizing tools and information for student activists. (You need to register on our site to view the database and ARC, but it’s free and easy).

Obviously, this is a very specific (some might say niche; I say unique) approach to the issue of sexual violence, and raises a few good questions about why we do what we do. I’m going to dedicate my next couple of posts to three of these questions (Why focus on college students? Why focus on policy? What are colleges doing dealing with sexual assault anyway?), but to avoid turning this intro post into a novel, for now I will just give you a sense of some of our core values.

• SAFER believes that universities should be implementing primary prevention strategies that focus on changing the behaviors and attitudes that enable sexual assault instead of only settling for risk-reduction techniques that put all of the responsibility on a potential victim to protect her/himself.
• We are dedicated to being a sex-positive organization that thinks about how to get people to talk openly about consent and communication so that they can work toward healthier sexual relationships, instead of just moaning about the evils of “hook-up culture.”
• We firmly believe that sexual violence is deeply connected to other forms of institutionalized violence, and push folks to consider how people with different identities come into the issue and are impacted differently by the language, activism, services and punitive systems surrounding it.
• We are committed to prioritizing student voices; we try never to take credit for students’ work, and want to provide support and guidance as opposed to telling activists what to do.
• Similarly, we know that every campus is different, and that there is not one model policy that will work at each school. Students need to do what’s right at their school.
• Finally, we know we’re still learning, and I’m really interested to hear feedback from readers as I start to put up posts.

So, what will you see in those posts? I’ll mostly be writing about—surprise!—campus sexual assault: what schools are doing right and what they are doing wrong. I’ll highlight some great student journalism and activism, and some not-so-great student editorial choices. I’ll be talking about aspects of rape culture like victim-blaming, rape “humor,” the fact that we don’t actually teach young people about consent, and how it all plays out on campus. I’ll try to highlight the fact that rape is not just a straight white woman issue, and we can’t treat it like one. I’ll also talk about SAFER, obvs.

I look forward to having a second blog home here, and want to really thank the Feministing crew for giving me and SAFER this opportunity. I should probably mention that even though I will always try to accurately represent SAFER’s values, I do speak for myself and not always every member of the Board.  So who am I? In brief: I am 25 and about to head back to school myself (and am currently terrified of that fact) for a masters in public administration. I live in NYC, consume a ton of horrible media, geek out over really great writing, and generally stress about the state of the world. Sounds familiar, perhaps. Anyways, here we go…