UWF hosts Take Back the Night

Angela Fail
Staff Writer

The 2004 Take Back the Night program, held April 14, represented the fifth year of ongoing sexual assault awareness activities at the University of West Florida, according to the University Web site.
The event, associated with Sexual Assault Awareness Month, was organized by students and faculty in the Anthropology Department, the Green Earth Fellowship, the UWF Women’s Studies Department and the Gay/Straight Alliance.
Christine Chapman, a senior anthropology major and this year’s director of the project, said that the event is designed to raise awareness and let women know that they are not alone.
“ I’m tired of telling women, ‘You have to defend yourself,’” she said.
“ I’d rather tell them, ‘You can stop rape.’”
But Chapman said that rape awareness should not be directed only at women, but at men as well.
“ If you ask a woman, ‘What do you do to protect yourself when you leave your home every day?’ she will run down a list of precautions she takes,” Chapman said.
“ But if you ask a man the same question, he won’t have an answer.”
Robert Philen, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, shared a presentation titled “Three Things Men Can Do About Rape” with an afternoon crowd of almost 100 listeners.
“ Stopping rape is in the hands of the male community,” he said.
Philen said rape is not an event, but rather an insidious part of society, and men can stop this part from growing by not contributing to the problem, listening to what women have to say and being a part of the solution.
“ It is important to envision that a solution is possible,” Philen said.
“ Sometimes hopeful idealism is more pragmatic than cynical realism.”
Afternoon activities included a self-defense/escape seminar by Patrick Gonzalez of Project Fight Back and a Clothesline Project coordinated by Amy Woodland, a UWF graduate.
“The Clothesline Project is a visual display that calls attention to violence against women,” said Denise Fraser-Vaselakos on the project’s Web site. Fraser-Vaselakos started the Clothesline Project Chicagoland & Suburbs in 1993, which was modeled after the original Clothesline Project.
“ The project displays shirts designed by women survivors of violence and families/friends of women victims of violence,” Fraser-Vaselakos said on the Web site. “The shirts hang side by side to ‘break the silence’ and to bear witness to violence against women.”
Woodland said that the original Clothesline Project was created by The Cape Cod Woman’s Agenda in Massachusetts in 1990.
“ They wanted to visually represent what they had experienced,” Woodland said.
According to the Clothesline Web site, “these women were convinced that the public needed to know that during the same time that 58,000 men were killed in the Vietnam War, 51,000 women were killed in America by men who supposedly loved them.”
The evening program included presentations by UWF professors Mary Lou Ruud and Mary Ann Fabbro, Dona Yarbrough of Tufts University, and several UWF students.
The event concluded with a reading of Andrea Dworkin’s “I Want a 24-hour Truce During Which There is No Rape,” followed by a candlelight memorial to victims of sexual assault, according to the University’s Web site.
For more information about the Clothesline Project, visit clothesline.org.