'The power of our own voices'

Ten years ago, the Princeton Take Back the Night March was preceded by a rash of graffiti — faculty members who supported the cause had "FemiNazi" scrawled across their office doors. In 1999, the twelve students who participated in the march were greeted with lewd comments and obscene shouts as they entered Holder Courtyard. Even as recently as two years ago, students in one of the residence halls blasted a soundtrack from a pornographic movie in order to drown out the stories of the survivors of sexual violence.

Obviously, there are some people who really don't like Take Back the Night.

That Take Back the night is deemed a controversial event makes no sense whatsoever to me. As I see it, it's just about one of the least controversial. Regardless of political persuasion, religious beliefs, ethnicity or sexual orientation, the belief behind Take Back the Night is something that everyone can agree with: Sexual violence is wrong.

A lot of the debate surrounding Take Back the Night centers around the seemingly antagonistic name of the event itself — the forceful idea of stealing back the night. But Take Back the Night isn't just a group of people tramping around campus one evening, chanting phrases that are relics of an earlier feminist movement. The true spirit of Take Back the Night is perhaps best captured in the title of the publication printed each year in conjunction with the march — Stopping the Silence. That's precisely what the march is intended for. It's not an event raising money for battered women. It's not a group therapy session for survivors of sexual violence. And it's most definitely not a witch hunt to seek out perpetrators and make them pay for their crimes.

Take Back the Night is an attempt to start dialogue. It's a forum in which survivors can share their stories with survivors and supporters alike. It's a place in which people can acknowledge that this is a problem, that sexual assault is a reality and, not to be hyperbolic, an epidemic. It is only through talking and openly addressing the issue that we can hope to see it come to an end. We're not going to end all sexual assualt by hiking around campus one night. But it's a start.

Sex, by its very nature, is a personal issue. Sexual assault, by the same token, is relegated to that private sector. Traditionally, survivors of sexual assault, whether women or men, don't talk about what happened to them. In fact, according to research from the U.S. Department of Justice, two-thirds of sexual assaults go unreported each year. When you consider that seven percent of American men will be assaulted in their lifetimes and that (according a Wellesley study) one in four women have been or will be raped, that's a lot of people not talking.

In 2001, more than 250 people took part in Take Back the Night's 15th anniversary march. That's a huge increase from the handful of marchers just two years earlier. Obviously, people are recognizing that sexual assault on the Princeton campus is an issue that can no longer be ignored. Whether or not Princeton's sexual atmosphere is representative of college campuses across the nation or not, we can't deny that it happens here — in our idyllic Princeton bubble — too.

Hopefully, one day, we won't have Take Back the Night anymore. We won't have to hear heart-wrenching stories of innocence taken much too soon, of people scarred forever because of a single horrible night. Until that day, though, all we have is the power of our own voices.

It's not just a women's issue. It's not just a liberal event. It's standing up against something that is unquestionably wrong. So please come out to Take Back the Night, starting at 8 p.m. in Murray Dodge. It is only with your presence and your voice that we can stop the silence.

Iris Blasi is an English major from Springfield, N.J.