Those traveling down Locust Walk last night stopped to join the crowd gathered around the Compass, where students and community members were speaking out against sexual violence.
Survivors, survivors’ friends and family and supportive students took the microphone to talk about their experiences.
Spectators who did not speak still felt the emotional power of the event, which was planned as a reaction to the recent incidences of sexual violence — a stranger rape on Sept. 26 and an acquaintance rape on Sept. 27 — on Penn’s campus.
Some shared original poems and others gave impromptu speeches about the emotional, physical and psychological pain caused by sexual assault. Two members of the Excelano Project performed spoken-word pieces.
College junior Alex Feinson, who attended the event, said she was “proud of how people came together,” and “glad that we now have this fire burning underneath us to act more strongly [against sexual violence].”
Josh Pollack, a College senior and president of One-in-Four, an all-male group organized against sexual violence, planned the open-mic speak out in collaboration with the Penn Women’s Center.
Pollack said he hoped that the event would be a “chance for the Penn community to express feeling or concerns about increased sexual violence in the past few weeks.”
He also said he hoped the event would raise awareness about sexual violence in general, as well as start a campus-wide dialogue on the subject. He explained that many survivors of sexual assault are reluctant to report incidents, but “in some ways, it’s good that [news of the assaults] is coming out” because so many go unreported.
PWC Violence Prevention Educator Jessica Mertz said PWC and One-in-Four “assumed that people were upset” about the recent sexual assaults on campus and “needed to act quickly to give people a chance to say what they were feeling.”
In addition to Pollack, Penn Consortium for Undergraduate Women Chairwomanand College senior Rosa Cui spoke at the event, as did Alicia Oglesby and Ed Bradley, representatives from Philadelphia’s chapter of Women Organized Against Rape.
Cui mentioned that many women don’t feel comfortable talking about sexual violence, and that PCUW is working to establish the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania as a rape crisis center. Philadelphia currently only has two rape crisis centers — Temple University Hospital - Episcopal Campus and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
But in spite of the organized event, Oglesby, a counselor at WOAR, expressed surprise that she didn’t see “as much uproar [on Penn’s campus] as there might be. Obviously One-in-Four is initiating some sort of response, but it doesn’t seem that many people know what this means for campus.”
“Many people are uneducated about rape,” Bradley, a prevention education specialist from WOAR, added. “People don’t understand the behavior [that constitutes rape] and what it can do.”
