Guest Column by the Executive Board of ASAP | A Call to Action: Collegiate ACB Must Go

Abuse and Sexual Assault Prevention is a Penn student group committed to fighting rape culture and myths about sexual violence. We plan and host Take Back The Night every spring, a campus-wide event in which the Penn community can speak out against sexual violence and protest the rape culture that shames survivors into silence. The website “Collegiate ACB” is a manifestation of the rape culture that ASAP works to undermine and eliminate.

Collegiate ACB is an online forum used by students of colleges and universities across the country to discuss “campus life.” Unfortunately, it is more often used by students — and specifically by Penn students — to anonymously engage in slut-shaming, fat-shaming, homophobic, misogynistic and otherwise slanderous conversations about Penn students.

Collegiate ACB perpetuates the culture of violence that ASAP, and so many other student groups and individuals, work to combat. We, the Executive Board of ASAP, call on the University community as a whole to help our organization and its affiliates take down this website. The site is harmful, destructive and illegal for the following reasons:

The content on Collegiate ACB is libelous, where libel is a written defamation. Given that individuals post anonymously on the website, they are not held accountable for their lies, insults, slander, slurs and disparagement.

The content on Collegiate ACB is hate speech. It cannot be defended by calling upon one’s First Amendment right to freedom of expression. The content discriminates against individuals on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, socioeconomic status and social affiliation.

The content on Collegiate ACB is damaging psychologically, emotionally and socially. The consequences of the attacks on this website are not minute. Rather, victims are impacted in profound and lasting ways.

The content on Collegiate ACB is dehumanizing. Real human beings are compared for their body parts, trashed for their sexual desires, disparaged for their clothes and blamed for the violence that is committed against them. Objectification perpetuates a culture of violence on Penn’s campus. It creates an environment in which perpetrators feel justified in abusing their peers.

We believe that Penn is better than this. In fact, Penn is better than this.

Please join ASAP as we take action against Collegiate ACB. For more information, please email ASAP at asapoutreach@gmail.com. We all have a stake in seeing Collegiate ACB shut down. The site is a threat to Penn’s culture, Penn’s reputation and Penn’s future.

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