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While many people celebrated Valentine’s Day by giving their partners flowers and gifts, others spent the day carrying signs around the Duck Pond to protest sexual violence and the sexual assault of women.
Members of UniteWomen.org, a women’s rights advocacy group, conducted “One Billion Rising,” an event at which participants silently protested for women’s rights Thursday. UNM’s Women’s Resource Center helped organize the event.
Marisa Silva-Dunbar, a UNM alumna and director of the Region Five Division of UniteWomen.org, said sexual assault is a serious problem worldwide.
“It’s disgusting that one in three women is going to be abused or raped in their lifetime,” she said. “We want the world to know that we are not taking it lying down.”
Silva-Dunbar said her group organized the event in part because of the recent sexual assaults on campus. On Jan. 27 two men allegedly grabbed a female UNM student while she was jogging at Johnson Field, held her down and groped her under her clothes; and on Feb. 4 a man allegedly groped a female UNM student over her clothes outside Castetter Hall.
Silva-Dunbar said the community has downplayed the seriousness of the assaults and the University has mocked the incidents by calling them “gropings.” She said the event aimed to introduce the significance of the incidents to the University community.
Silva-Dunbar said that today’s society has adopted a culture of “victim blaming” in which victims of sexual assaults are often blamed for being abused or raped. She said the government has not done enough to counter this culture.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve definitely seen how women can be pushed to the back burners or how politicians want to put us back in the kitchens,” she said. “We will not stand for violence against anyone.”
During the event participants rang a bell every two minutes, which Silva-Dunbar said symbolized the fact that every two minutes a woman in the world gets beaten or raped.
UNM student Frankie Flores said the dialogue surrounding sexual assault needs to change.
“I think the dialogue right now is ‘women shouldn’t get raped,’ instead of ‘men shouldn’t rape women,’” he said. “We tell women that if they dress provocatively that they deserve it. I don’t think we tell men that a woman’s body is a woman’s body.”
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UNM student Julie Boyette said she wanted to protest against sexual violence in general and not just on women. She said the University has not provided sufficient response to the recent incidents of sexual assault on campus.
“They don’t take it seriously, and I think students also don’t take it seriously because we live in a rape culture,” she said.
She said she wants UNM to provide more on-campus police patrols, better lighting at night and student education about sexual violence.
Silva-Dunbar said she expects the University to spend more on campus safety and to listen to students more keenly about their demands and complaints.
She also said people should learn to respect everybody equally in order for the number of sexual assaults to deteriorate.
