Students gather to Take Back the Night

“I had a sense that my rape and winning the crown had a reason,” Abargil said in her keynote speech at the Take Back the Night event hosted by Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education (SHARE) on Thursday evening.

“I think it helped me … to win. I didn’t try too hard, so the judges felt I was real,” she told the audience of nearly 100 people gathered on the Frist Campus Center south lawn. “My hope is to shed light on the word ‘rape’ by telling my story and the stories of other women by telling them not to be silent, not to share blame.”

Though most of SHARE’s events — like “Sex on a Saturday Night” — are designed to promote awareness of sexual assault, SHARE member Whitney Williams ’09 said, adding that she believed Take Back the Night had a different purpose.

“A lot of people talk about how this is about awareness of sexual assault, which is what we try to do all year,” Williams said. “But I think this event is really about showing the campus community that we don’t condone it in any way, shape or form, and that people who have experienced sexual assault are supported by the community.”

In 2007, Princeton reported 14 sexual offenses, more than any other Ivy League school, Abargil noted in her speech while commending the work of groups like SHARE that encourage students to report assaults.

Before Abargil’s keynote speech, SHARE members read anonymous student accounts of their own sexual assaults. Josh Franklin ’11 recounted the story of a girl who was assaulted in a Frist bathroom, describing how the assaulter crawled under the stall door to rape her.

“He slammed me up against the wall,” Franklin read. “I was just so terrified that I wasn’t thinking about the best way to completely incapacitate him.” Franklin noted that this rape occurred on a Sunday night in the fall semester of the girl’s sophomore year, while there were plenty of other students around.

“We’re here to show support for survivors and their families,” SHARE director Suraiya Baluch explained. “We’re here to bear witness to experiences that will be shared by survivor accounts and the abuse that was showed to survivors by assault.”

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SHARE co-president Courtney Quiros ’10 said she believes the movement to “take back the night” began when “the first women and the first men shared their experiences being abused with their relatives and friends.”

“I think this subject has to be talked about much more,” Abargil said in an interview following her speech. “I wish people would just start talking about it without feeling ashamed or hiding their stories or acting like it doesn’t exist,” she explained. “I wish there would be more people participating in these programs. I hope time will change that.”