At the beginning of last year’s Fall semester, a series of frightening assaults on young women took place on and off campus. I’m sure everyone who was at UF remembers these assaults; they were all over the news. The university sent out safety notices daily and UPD parked ostensibly empty cars on campus for long periods of time — I’m still not sure how much safety an obviously empty cop car guarantees, but I appreciate the effort.
These assaults were horrible, unjust and frightening. At the time, I felt our campus came together a little more, standing in solidarity against these attacks and everything they represented. Thankfully, this semester there have been fewer reported sexual assaults, albeit more armed robberies. But not so thankfully, it seems that many people at UF have forgotten about them.
Was the individual assaulting these women ever caught? Upsettingly, no. Has there been an end to sexual assault on our campus just because it’s not making the news? Certainly not. Is the university still doing its best to make sure that this campus is free from assault, informative about consent and preventative measures, and active against victim-blaming? Not really.
You might be thinking: Sally, calm down. It’s fine, there haven’t been any assaults, and if there were, then duh, the university would react accordingly.
Sorry, but that’s just not true. There have been more recent attacks, but they just haven’t attracted the UF alerts that ring up on our phone screens.
Every day, victims do not come forward, uncertain of their circumstances or shamed into silence. Every day, assaults take place even if they are not the big-scary-dude-comes-out-of-the-bushes type of attack. Men can be victims. Friends and acquaintances can be attackers.
The idea that sexual assault must fit absolutely into the conventional framework of a woman being attacked by a strange man while walking alone at night is unhealthy and unrealistic.
This framework promotes victim-blaming and reinforces the idea of women being the weaker sex and needing constant protection against assault rather than being worthy of living a life without assault in the first place.
UF needs to keep this in mind.
The other day, I heard some people joking about the Walk Safe program, which has quite suddenly been abandoned this semester apparently due to lack of funding. I won’t go into what they said, but it was pretty unsavory. It compared the program to sex trafficking — What? Really? — and it was offensive to just about everyone. It inspired this column, and it inspired my call for UF not to abandon its efforts to prevent sexual assault.
If people who go to the school we’re all proud to be part of can be so callous and uncaring about assault and rape, then we need to work together to put an end to this way of thinking.
The Walk Safe program is a good example of how UF was called to action but later fell short on its promise to provide a safe campus for students. Walk Safe provided students free late-night walking-escort services to students living on campus and Sorority Row from Library West. The program had its faults, but I definitely saw people using it. It promoted the ideals of safety and solidarity against, assault which UF doesn’t seem as obviously dedicated to.
Now it’s been discontinued, and as the Alligator wrote in a recent article, "Students have one fewer option for getting home safely." Should the university be cutting funding toward these safety efforts and offering students fewer options for a safe environment? We put a lot of money into this university for a lot of awesome things, but the struggle to combat and prevent sexual assault should be further up on the list. If UF simply must end the Walk Safe program, it needs to offer something else in its place — hopefully it can be something better.
Sally Greider is a UF English and public relations junior. Her column appears on Wednesdays.
