Sexual health activist Rachel Griffin drew upon personal history to explore gender violence with a group of 15 women in the McCormick Auditorium in Norris University Center Tuesday.
In a lecture organized by the Women’s Center for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Griffin discussed rape, its normalization in society and how men and women can work to raise consciousness in their community and create a safe space.
Griffin commended sexual assault workers but drew attention to Northwestern’s low assault report rates. She said this does not mean the problem does not exist, but instead asked what it is about this campus that keeps people from having that dialogue.
It took the Southern Illinois University professor seven years to tell someone that she had been a victim of acquaintance rape and realize that the shame she felt was not hers but his, she said. It is often easier for people to blame the choices of the victim in order to feel safer.
“Rape feels like you are living alone inside your own body,” Griffin said.
Often, people who should help survivors instead rationalize that it is the victim’s fault or do not believe them, she said.
“If a girl is on the street, wasted and butt-naked, it’s not a good choice, but there’s a difference between bad judgment and responsibility,” Griffin said.
The demographic most susceptible to gender violence is first-year undergraduate women. If one in four women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted in their lives, that means 268 undergraduate females in Northwestern will experience gender violence in their lifetime, she said.
Rebecca Crook, a SESP senior, said she came to the talk to “better understand the situation of rape in (her) home environment.”
Crook, who worked at a gender violence recovery center in Nairobi, Kenya, said she lives with three other women and was troubled with the high sexual assault rate.
Women’s Center Director Renée Redd said she wanted to bring Griffin to NU after seeing the way she grabbed the audience at a conference.
“Even if we helped one or two or three or four people, we have made a difference,” Redd said.
Griffin ended her lecture with three requests from audience members: engage in campus sexual health initiatives, always believe a survivor who decides to come forth and to encourage “progressive men.” She defined progressive men as males who listen to women and realize that there are things they cannot understand.
Anything from rape jokes, to People magazine and songs like Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” can become an educational moment for someone to correct the normalization of gender violence, Griffin said.
“What I’m asking is that you care deeply about gender violence, as if lives depend on it, because of course, of course, they do,” she said.
