Name: Kate Frisher
Year: Senior
Hometown: Copenhagen/San Francisco
Major: International Affairs, minors in Political Science and Communication
Student involvement: Member of Sexual Health Advocacy Resources of Education (SHARE), in which she also served as treasurer in 2012-13; Sexual Assault Response Campaign
How did you get involved with SHARE?
I got involved with SHARE my first semester of college. I had always been interested in reproductive rights, but when I lived in Denmark I didn’t have to deal with particular reproductive issues since it’s a socially liberal place. People don’t think of how to obtain the pill because there are really no obstacles standing in the way of getting it, abortion isn’t even an argument because it’s assumed that people have that right. Moving back to the U.S. really politicized me when I realized how many reproductive rights I’d taken for granted and how much easier it was to access reproductive health care in Denmark compared to the U.S.
Northeastern is currently holding a campus-wide referendum to bring a gender resource center on campus. Can you elaborate on what your campaign is about? What is Title IX?
This campaign was prompted by the federal investigation of Northeastern for violating Title IX, but honestly comes out of much more long-standing student concerns that NU is not supporting survivors of sexual assault. One of the things we’ve heard from students over and over again is that support services for survivors of sexual assault are confusing and difficult to obtain. The majority of students don’t know how to report or what the process looks like; even if they do, many still find the services offered inaccessible and inadequate. This discourages survivors from reporting and can further retraumatize those that chose to do so, creating an unsafe and hostile environment on campus.
We’re proposing a gender resource center as a first step towards addressing sexual assault and gender inequity at Northeastern. The center would finally give a safe, physical space to our sexual assault services, streamlining the reporting process and making it significantly more survivor-friendly. But it would also offer programming and education about gender issues in general, not just sexual violence — things like discrimination, gender identity, and so on. Lastly, the center would serve as a space where students and student groups who care about these issues could meet and collaborate. Title IX is the law that all universities who receive federal funding must abide by, mandating gender equity on campus. Though it was originally created to address inequity in sports, in the past few years, we’ve seen it more frequently applied to cases of sexual assault. Students are now lodging Title IX complaints to the Department of Education to assert that university policies and systems for dealing with sexual assault are inadequate and lead to unsafe and hostile environments for women. Currently, there are over 100 schools under investigation for Title IX violations including Northeastern. However, no school has yet to lose federal funding, even if found in violation.
Why is it important to you?
Reproductive rights are a matter of human rights, bodily autonomy, and individual respect; with reproductive health, it’s a personal decision. The only person making that choice is the woman. Reproductive rights imply that we trust women to make deliberate, autonomous decisions. Suppressing reproductive rights for women is attacking broader feminism in general; it is infantilizing and disrespectful to assume that women cannot, or should not, make their own decisions about their welfare. Within four years of being here, I can no longer count the number of people I know who have been sexually assaulted on two hands, including a close friend of mine. It’s sad, but mostly it’s frustrating. It’s exhausting and dehumanizing to live in an environment that doesn’t value our lives as women. This has been talked about since my Freshman year. I’ve been at Northeastern for four years; I’m invested, and now that I’m graduating, I want to see the foundation laid for a safe space. It’s time, and Northeastern students deserve better. They really do.
What is Barstool Sports?
In winter of 2012, a website called Barstool Sports was hosting an event they called “Northeastern Blackout Barstool.” In addition to generally misogynistic, racist, homophobic, etc. content, they had recently posted an article about a rape case where the assailant was found innocent because the woman was wearing skinny jeans and the jury deemed it would’ve been impossible for him to remove them without her assistance. This is bad enough, but in Barstool’s “coverage” of it, they went even further to state that the woman was asking for it and anyone over a size six wearing skinny jeans deserved to be raped.
So obviously students were upset that this was the type of event Northeastern had it’s name on. Initially, Knockout Barstool began just as an effort to raise awareness about the problematic content on Barstool and to pressure Northeastern to remove their name from the event (which they did). But the negative and vitriolic response from students really alerted us to the larger issue of rape culture on Northeastern’s campus. It was really an instance where the reaction proved the need for the action in the first place. Students involved were receiving rape threats, one woman had her address posted online.
Knockout hosted a survivor-only speakout the same night as the Barstool event where survivors of sexual assault talked about their experiences followed by a march and protest at The House of Blues where the event was being held. That was definitely the polarizing moment for many students because for the first time, we were finally talking about the issues of sexual assault and rape culture at Northeastern out in the open. It was also my first step into “activism,” so I’d say it was definitely a catalytic moment for me.
I’ve been told that Northeastern has ViSION (Violence Support, Intervention, and Outreach Network) as a sexual assault resource center. How is this gender resource center different from ViSION?
ViSION is a network where you can call during business hours or e-mail–but it’s manned by only two people!!! If someone is assaulted outside of business hours (shocker!), then you have no choice but to go to the NUPD (Northeastern University Police Department). Each shift, there is only guaranteed to be one office present trained responding to people who have been sexually assaulted. If that officer happens to be called away, the survivor may be placed with an officer untrained in dealing with sexual assault, which can be re-traumatizing even if the person is comfortable going to the police to begin with. These policies are intended to dissuade students from reporting cases of sexual assault, because the more students that report it, the more cases the school has to record. This isn’t a problem solely at Northeastern–it’s a national problem.
How can people get involved with your campaign and/or SHARE?
Assuming our referendum passes, there will still be a long road to actually implementing and creating a gender resource center on campus. We’ve seen in the past how Northeastern stalls student activism by bogging us down with bureaucracy and seemingly never-ending coalition meetings. We’re hopeful that doesn’t happen, but it’s going to be important that we hold the university accountable moving forward.
Specifically, there are two actions we have coming up regardless of the outcome of the referendum. First, we have a small research group developing an actual proposal for a gender resource center. This includes studying the models at other schools, examining potential spaces on Northeastern’s campus, and even some cost analysis and prediction.
The second action is our letter delivery campaign for the campus climate survey on sexual assault. What this is — last fall Northeastern sent out a campus climate survey on sexual assault to a random selection of students. This was actually a great move, and the first step in the right direction towards assessing the extent of the problem of sexual assault at Northeastern. Unfortunately, they’ve failed to do anything with the results since then. We think it’s really important that Northeastern releases these results and finally acknowledges that sexual assault is a problem on campus so we may begin moving forward as a community to solve the issue. On April 6th, we’ll be delivering our first letter to administration formally requesting the results be released and if they refuse, we’ll begin the process of formulating and distributing our own survey (check out Huntington News for a more in-depth look at that campaign)–> http://huntnewsnu.com/2015/04/group-demands-survey-results/
If you want to get involved with either, we encourage you to like our facebook page where we regularly post about meetings and come to one of our meetings. Or join us tabling — we don’t bite!