By In response to the recent alleged sexual assaults on and off campus, cultural and political organization La Raza and Cal State Long Beach students staged a silent protest against sexual assault Tuesday.
The group sported posters cut into silhouettes of women and lined up along one of the pathways in the free speech area on campus. The 10 silhouettes represented the 10 sexual assaults that have been reported on campus in the 2015-16 academic year.
“We wanted to do a banner, but I feel like so many people are so desensitized to reading banners that if you use something physical to create and embody this message, I felt like it would be stronger,” said Karla Camacho, a former officer of La Raza and a member of the club for the past three years.
University police sent out a standard email on Monday reporting that there had been a sexual assault over the weekend in compliance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure Act. According to the email, a “CSULB student reported she was sexually assaulted at a party where alcoholic beverages are reported to have been widely consumed.”
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The assault had been reported to the CSULB Police Department on Monday and is said to have taken place early Sunday morning.
“It was in direct response to that email,” said Jessie Lopez, a La Raza officer and sociology graduate student. “We were going to try and do it yesterday, but the sun just came down too quick, and we ran out of sunlight. We had to reschedule it for today at rush hour.”
La Raza members stood in silence for 30 minutes to show their solidarity with the recent sexual assault survivors. Some students and faculty joined in on the protest. Other students disregarded or sneered at the demonstrators.
Second year psychology major Juvonne McNeill said she happened to walk by the event and decided to join.
“This is happening all the time, and the campus and a lot of other campuses are treating this as if it’s not happening,” McNeill said. “They’re not addressing it, and they’re blaming it on the alcohol or the victims and it’s just not supposed to be happening like this.”
After the 30 minutes of silence, the demonstrators walked down to The Nugget and circled back around past the bookstore and up the corridor to the library. As they marched, they came into contact with Tau Kappa Epsilon, who were also set up on campus to spread awareness of sexual assault.
Tau Kappa Epsilon asked students and fellow fraternity members to take a pledge against sexual assault. They also shared resources which assist anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted before.
John Broadway, a third year journalism major and president of Tau Kappa Epsilon, said that the fraternity has been promoting awareness of sexual assault for the past three years. The fact that the event took place right after the news of the past weekend is completely coincidental, Broadway said.
“We do this event every semester,” Broadway said. “We just happened to have it on a date right after that whole thing happened.”
According to Broadway, Tau Kappa Epsilon reached out to other fraternities before the event and asked for support to help make a stand. He said some members of Kappa Sigma, Phi Kappa Alpha, and Theta Chi showed up to support the event.
“When [sexual assault] happens, it doesn’t just make one fraternity look bad, it makes us all look bad, so we’re hoping to make a stand and make a difference,” Broadway said. “There’s been a lot of incidents in the Greek system where there’s been sexual assault so we just wanted to take a stand against that and show that it’s not how we all are.”
Available resources on campus for student survivors of sexual assault include Not Alone at the Beach and Counseling and Psychological Services.
I’m just curious as to why as a student I have only received 2 timely warning emails when a sexual assault has been reported in the last year, but there apparently have been 10? What about the other 8 reports? Why do we not have access to those? Are timely warnings only linked to campus organizations but not individuals? This doesn’t seem fair.