Zainab Ilyas

· 16 Nov 2021

Follow Following

When is Sexual Assault Awareness month?

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Every April, SHARPP joins other groups throughout the country to commemorate National Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). We work together to raise awareness about sexual assault, harassment, and violence in our various communities and to prevent it. SHARPP holds a variety of awareness activities and prevention initiatives for UNH students, professors, and staff members every April. This month, we want to do more than raise "awareness" about the incidence of sexual assault. We go from the goal of raising awareness to a focus on avoiding violence in the first place and encouraging collective activity in order to effect community change.

Preventing violence requires a collective effort and responsibility from the entire community. Community advocacy, student activism, and grassroots community organization were (and continue to be) at the heart of the fight to eliminate sexual assault. We ask you to become a part of the solution by learning more about sexual assault, sharing what you've learned with others, and taking active action to promote social change. More information on the movement's origins and useful tactics for becoming engaged may be found below.

Roots of the Movement

Although SAAM has only been recognized nationally since 2001, it is crucial to highlight that UNH has had anti-violence activities and activism since the 1970s. SHARPP(previously known as the Rape Task Force) was founded in 1978 as a consequence of student and community action. Zooming out to look at the national history of anti-violence activity, we may go back to the 1940s and 1950s, when the civil rights movement gave birth to movements for equality and social transformation. Advocates for these causes (such as Audre Lorde, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and Maya Angelou) worked at the intersections of racial and gender violence in their activism. In the 1970s, there was a need for widespread societal reform on the subject of sexual assault. The first rape crisis center opened in San Francisco in 1971, and the first Take Back The Night event was held there a few years later.

Throughout the decades that followed, the number of Take Back The Night rallies, marches, and protests grew steadily, furthering the debate about sexual assault. Marches ranged from demands for increased resources and safety for female college students to protests against violent pornographic films and shows of indignation following the nighttime murders of women (Take Back The Night, 2021). Anti-violence activists have been conducting events, marches, vigils, observances, and rallies aimed at reducing sexual violence since the 1970s. With our national Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we acknowledge, celebrate, and continue this community organizing. This month, at SHARPP, we prefer to think of it as a continuation and amplification of the anti-violence work that we do all year. We ask you to participate in raising awareness about and preventing sexual assault throughout April, and then carry what you've learned with you long after the month is over.

Get Involved & Create Community Change

Ending sexual abuse requires a collective effort and responsibility from the whole community. It becomes simpler to effect societal change if we accept this principle. It is up to us to make our UNH community a safe haven free of violence, harassment, abuse, discrimination, and oppression. Here are some ideas and tactics for how you can be engaged in bringing sexual assault to light and preventing it.
#april
#sexualassualt
#month
#tealmonth