At SpeakOut event, students urged to take sexual assault seriously

The event, hosted by SpeakOut and titled “Sexual Assault is Not a Joke,” allowed victims of sexual assault to share their stories and encouraged discussion of sexual assault among participants. Posters for the event urged Princetonians to “fight for a Princeton community that openly condemns acts of sexual violence.” The posters also criticized the joking tone of the Oct. 22 list of “Top Ten Princeton Halloween costumes” in The Daily Princetonian Street section, which listed No. 1 as “a public masturbator.”

Christa Pehl GS, who was assaulted off campus in September, related her experiences to the crowd. “I was out for a walk with my cell phone and a cup of tea at 9:30 p.m.,” she said. Her assailant waited until Pehl got to a dark point between two street lamps and attacked her from behind, pulling her behind a bush in the front lawn of an unoccupied house. He pummeled her in the face until she finally mustered up the strength to throw him off, Pehl said. Contrary to the mass e-mail that was sent out to students following the incident, she could not stand up, let alone run home, Pehl added.

Dominique Salerno ’10 said the e-mails sent out by the University about these cases of sexual assault, like the ones involving incidents of public masturbation, are dangerously downplayed. “The appearance of safety seems to be more important than the real safety,” she noted.

Several students at the event said they thought the Princeton community’s reaction to recent cases of assault was insufficient. A few victims of assault at the event said, though, that this might be due to the inevitable failure of an e-mail or warning to effectively relate the horror and urgency of these cases.

“This is an unsafe situation that all students at Princeton need to know,” Pehl said, advising University students to “help each other.” On the night of her incident, she said, she “was screaming and screaming, and people stood around me in a circle and just watched” until somebody finally intervened and called the police.

The reaction Pehl received to her experience was critical, she said. “As soon as I brought out the word ‘rape,’ people froze,” she said. “They had this attitude that I should be embarrassed, that it was me for a reason.”

Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay ’10, who was unable to attend the event, said she contacted SpeakOut about getting involved after seeing the group’s posters highlighting the ‘Prince’ Top Ten.

“I was upset by the column,” she said of the ‘Prince’ list, noting that a friend of hers was one of the victims of the masturbation incidents. “It’s not just that it was making light of [sexual assault], but that it was bringing it up in a way that wasn’t helpful or constructive, which is what we need to do on this campus,” Kissinger-Virizlay explained. “My personal reaction was definitely concern for my friend and anger that I didn’t think the topic was being brought up in a way that was appropriate and required.”

“And it wasn’t just the ‘Prince,’ ” she added. “Public Safety phrased their e-mails in a way that didn’t quite express the seriousness of the event.”

SpeakOut member Meredith Bock ’10 also said she thought the Public Safety alert e-mails were “easy to misinterpret.”

“We just wanted to have a conversation about how to write these e-mails that makes their acceptance within the community a little more realistic,” she said. “The ‘Prince’ in addition to the student body, [reacted] in a completely understandable way in thinking [the incidents] were way less serious than they were.”