Lori Graham
Contributing Writer
The United Feminist Movement (UFM), a student-led activist group for sexual- and gender-based violence awareness and survivor support, continues to seek increased transparency and student representation from Virginia Tech’s Sexual Violence Culture and Climate (SVCC) work group.
The UFM at Virginia Tech, organizers of the annual Take Back the Night event, as well as many other campaigns and rallies throughout the year, works to continue awareness and activism in the community.
“Our main focus is intersectional feminist activism in the Virginia Tech community and beyond,” the UFM at Virginia Tech’s Facebook page states.
Take Back the Night has been the organization’s biggest event at Virginia Tech University and Blacksburg since 1990; however, the event is part of a national movement that began in the 1970s. Every year, students, faculty, staff, and community supporters peacefully gather to rally and march in a public display of unity and activism. Chants can be heard as men, women, and children walk the streets carrying signs with slogans like:
“However we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no!”
In the fall of 2021, President Tim Sands created the Sexual Violence Culture and Climate (SVCC) Work Group. According to the SVCC’s webpage, the group was created by Sands to “advance the university’s commitment to end sexual violence and enhance preventative programming at VT.”
Since the work group, the successes they share on their website and through news releases are an improved email alert, launching a webpage, increased training, and laying plans for campaigns in the future. One of these planned campaigns was a Sexual Violence Summit to be held in Spring 2023.
However, student representatives and members of the United Feminist Movement say a lack of transparency in the group’s work still exists. Representatives of the Virginia Tech student organization say they have requested meeting agendas and minutes from the SVCC with no response. They are also asking for more student representation on the committees so that they are given a stronger voice in the group’s proceedings. The SVCC currently has two student representatives, one from the Graduate Senate and one from the Undergraduate Senate.
Mary Weeks, Treasurer of the United Feminist Movement and VT student, believes that not only a more inclusive student representation should happen, but involving those students that have been working as activists and in supporting survivors of sexual assault and gender-based harassment and violence should be a requirement.
“In the spring of 2022, we held a demonstration at the Board of Visitors,” Weeks said. “We wrote out a list of demands in response to the sexual assaults that were happening in the fall of 2021.”
Just weeks prior to this demonstration was the announcement of the SVCC work group creation by President Sands, Weeks said.
More recently, a vote of no confidence letter was also drafted by the Graduate Professional Student Senate (GPSS), and dated February 2, 2023, in response to the SVCC work group’s progress, or lack thereof.
The letter, posted on the GPSS Virginia Tech webpage, states that “the Senate held a vote of no confidence in the current proceedings of the SVCC. The GPSS states that the SVCC at present is not meeting the mission it was tasked by University Council to achieve” signed by The Senators and Executive Board of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate.
A result of the vote was due to many student concerns listed in the letter including but not limited to: a lack of clarity as to who is representing the students, how student representatives are selected for the work group, the involvement of student organizations (with the exception of student Senates), specifically a lack of representation of groups serving sexual assault survivors like the UFM, and a communication to student groups at remote VT locations.
The GPSS also called for a more defined “roadmap” that would clarify the direction the work group plans to take in the future to help make needed changes in policy and cultural climate on Virginia Tech’s campus.
Susan Anderson, Mathematics Professor, Blacksburg Town Councilmember, and a recently added member to the SVCC work group as Faculty Senate Representative, has supported Take Back the Night for many years. She explains that Take Back the Night had been held every year since 1990, until Covid hit, which is the first and only time it did not happen.
“Take Back the Night is one of our main actions every single year. I would like to tell you since 1990, we have had a Take Back the Night every single year and that was true for 30 years until 2019 and Covid hit. We did not have Take Back the Night for the first time, and it felt like a death in the family,” Anderson said.
The Lyric theater live streamed the event in 2021, and then in 2022 were about to return to the in-person event.
“We are not naïve enough to believe that just coming to a rally is going to change the face of violence in our community, but we believe that hundreds of people coming to a rally, finding the resources, learning how to create change, small change, every single day, does lessen violence in our community,” Anderson said.
Among the many campaigns and events that the UFM supports, they also work with the Local National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter, and the Women’s Center, in supporting The Clothesline Project. The Clothesline Project is a campaign to bring awareness of sexual violence in a more visual way. People who have been affected by violence are encouraged to express their emotions by decorating a t-shirt. The shirts are then hung on a clothesline to visualize the number of survivors, and their friends and families, that have been impacted by sexual violence.
Weeks said there is much more that can be done by the SVCC work group, expressing a need for incoming VT students to have required orientation and training and workshops for other student organizations.
“There is a hazing training that fraternities and sororities have to go through, we suggested that maybe they should start doing that with consent. Doing like consensual workshops for different organizations and during freshman orientation” Weeks said. “Giving a little workshop on what does consent look like and what does a healthy relationship look like, and what manipulation looks like in regard to that.”
Weeks also shared a continued desire for more transparency from the SVCC.
“Transparency through the work group and seeing those meeting minutes and seeing what they are like, what policies they are implementing, seeing the progress they are making is something we really want to see” Weeks said.
Attempts for comments from other SVCC work group members did not receive a response.
If students have been a victim of sexual or gender-based violence, there are departments on campus that can help. One active organization on campus is the Women’s Center, offering resources for students, faculty, and staff who have been a victim of sexual- or gender-based violence, or may find themselves in a supportive position of a survivor of sexual violence. Another group called SAVES, Sexual Assault and Violence Education by Students, is a peer education group that facilitates education and supportive programs about sexual assault and healthy relationships.
More information about the United Feminist Movement at VT can be found on their Facebook page. Take Back the Night annual event and rally information can be found at takebackthenight.org.
