For Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which occurs every April, members of the New School community are organizing a series of events to create dialogues around the issue of sexual assault.
The month-long campaign is devoted to raising “public awareness about sexual assault and educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence,” said Rachel Knopf, assistant director of wellness and health promotion at The New School. “It’s one part of a path of individual and community healing and part of a cultural shift that does not tolerate sexual violence.”
Last week, the Sex-E collective set up an altar in the Social Justice Hub at the University Center. The altar is constructed annually “to honor survivors in our community,” according to Aaron Neber, a member of the Sex-E collective and a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.
The altar includes resource handouts for sexual assault and healthy relationships, ribbons, messages of support, and supplies for students to create their own messages of support.
New this year, the Sex-E collective constructed a second altar in the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at 66 Fifth Ave. as part of an exhibit beginning April 11 and going through April 26. The exhibit, I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment examines the gendering of everyday objects and asks visitors to consider the ways in which design has influenced their experiences and perceptions of gender. The exhibit is organized by Michelle Fisher, a part-time faculty member at Parsons, and Jimena Acosta, an independent curator.
The Sex-E collective, a New School student-run sexual education organization, focuses on sex positivity and sexual violence prevention. Run by peer health advocates within Student Health Services, the Sex-E collective is organizing a number of events around campus for, including an “empowered upstander” training, a screening and panel discussion of a web show exploring sexuality.
One of the first events for the month organized on campus, “Being an Empowered Upstander: How Do We Take Care of Our Communities and Ourselves?” was a training session hosted on April 12 by Judith Lesser, a graduate student at the Columbia School of Social Work and intern at Student Health Services at The New School. Added in response to increases in hate crimes since the 2016 election, the new “empowered upstander” training aimed to give participants “tools we can use when we see violence enacted in our communities,” including methods for intervention and de-escalation, said Lesser.
On April 17, the Sex-E collective will host a screening of “Sex Café,” a web series featuring “unapologetic conversations between women discussing female sexuality, gender equality, and everything that comes with it.”
Produced by Goldie Poll and Dasha Nagorodnyuk, both students at The New School for Public Engagement, each episode of the show features different women in conversation about topics ranging from online dating to puberty. At the April 17 event, Poll and Nagorodnyuk plan to show episodes from the first season of the web series and have a question and answer session with viewers and past participants.
“We really want people to be able to attend the panel and conversation because that’s the whole purpose of the show. It’s just involving people to give them a platform to speak,” Nagorodnyuk said.
Photos by Orlando Mendiola
Anna is the Features Editor for the Free Press. She is a senior at Lang, majoring in Journalism + Design and minoring in Politics.
