Add Your Voice to Vice President Joe Biden's Anti-Rape Campaign

by Shaker KaterTot

[Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence.]

Vice President Joe Biden, who has long lent his support to programs and policies combating violence against women, launched a new campaign, 1 is 2 Many, in honor of the 17th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act. In the accompanying video, he cites a bunch of statistics (also available in text at the site) that mostly make me want to throw up, so I'm not going to repeat them here. (Spoiler Alert! Sexual assault and dating violence on campus is incredibly pervasive.) Then he asks for public input on how to make campuses safer for all students and requests ideas for how to prevent dating violence and sexual assault.

Please take a minute to fill out the form (or you can use the grammatically-incorrect hashtag #1is2many on Twitter) and teaspoon a bit for appropriate violence prevention tactics. In other words, let's be quite clear about who is responsible for preventing these types of violence: Those who are at risk of perpetrating such violence.

There is, as Shakers well know, a whole world out there where potential victims are tasked with the prevention of sexual violence. Let's advocate an alternative solution.

Some of my ideas include: Education on consent as a mandatory part of sex education (for those school districts that still provide it...sigh); campaigns that give folks tools to educate each other when they hear violent and/or degrading rhetoric against women, members of the LGBTQI community, people of color, people with disabilities, and other marginalized populations at higher risk for sexual violence; introducing reinventions of prevention strategies like the "buddy system" to task men with holding their male friends accountable; and centering concepts that go beyond "no means no" and reach the realm of enthusiastic consent (silence might mean no, consent must be repeatedly given for each sexual act, etc).

Although the campaign is US campus-specific, college campuses are steeped in rape culture just like everywhere else, so awareness-raising ideas that are not campus-specific will be valuable, too.

Please feel free to borrow my ideas and/or add your ideas in comments, too. Let's raise our voices and our teaspoons and use this opportunity to send a strong message about appropriate ways to address the staggering rates of assault on campus.

Non USian Shakers, go for it; you'll just need a US zip code for the form.

The form can be located here. Thanks folks!