Students ‘Kick-Off’ Take Back the Night Week

Take Back the Night kicked off yesterday—literally—when three Harvard police officers taught nine female students how to protect themselves from attackers in a two-hour Rape Aggression Defense workshop.

After alerting the students about date rape drugs, including Rohypnol or “Ruffies,” and distributing whistles, the three female officers demonstrated safety stances, straight punches and sweep kicks.

“[The workshop] was really good, really interesting,” Ellen E. Lee ’02 said. “I thought the physical part was the best just because it was something new and I had never seen it before.”

Organized by the Coalition Against Sexual Violence (CASV) and the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS), the workshop is one of a week-long series of events dedicated to promoting awareness of sexual violence.

This year, the week’s organizers have made a concerted effort to enlist as many student groups as possible to help plan and sponsor this week’s activities as well as to expand the range of the event.

Coalition member Sarah B. Levit-Shore ’04 said over the years, the event has increasingly attemped to address how sexual violence affects different groups at Harvard.

The publicity co-chair for Take Back the Night, Betty C. Luther ’03, said organizers have encouraged both male and female members of the Harvard community to participate.

“Men can be victims of sexual violence and the family members, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and brothers of any individual can be a victim of sexual violence,” Luther said. “It is not an issue that only affects women.”

Today, Radcliffe Fellow Judith L. Herman ’64 will lead a workshop geared toward helping those close to victims of sexual assault at 4 p.m. in the Ticknor Lounge. Herman is a clinical professor of psychiatry.

A screening of “Defending Our Lives,” a short documentary based on a group of women who killed their sexual abusers, will follow at 7 p.m. in Sever 306.

“I think it’s really important that if you care about the issue that you go to all the events,” said event co-chair Erica R. Michelstein ’02, also a Crimson editor. “I had no idea when I was co-chair of Take Back the Night [last year] how much I was going to learn and to be affected by what I heard and saw.”

Later this week, a new multimedia presentation will precede the capstone of the event, Thursday’s candlelight vigil. Entitled “A Long Walk Home: A Story of a Rape Survivor,” the presentation chronicles the recovery of rape survivor and third-year graduate student Salamishah M. Tillet through photos, poetry, song and dance.

“[The presentation] makes it a better experience for the audience—something more palatable,” Tillet said. “Because it is a pretty project, it sort of finds the beauty in the horror of all of it.”

Tillet also appeared in yesterday’s premiere of “Rape Is...,” a documentary which investigates rape in a cultural context and presents interviews with survivors. Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologues fame and Diane Rosenfeld, a fellow at the Harvard Law School, also appear in the documentary.

In addition to hosting discussions and panels, Take Back the Night volunteers will be handing out purple ribbons in front of the Science Center throughout the week. The ribbons symbolize support for victims of sexual violence. The Clothesline project, a display of shirts decorated by survivors of sexual violence, will also be exhibited in the Sever Quad.

Originating in an 1877 demonstration held by English women who were protesting their inability to safely walk the streets at night, Take Back the Night came to the U.S. when a national march in San Francisco adopted the title as its theme to protest pornography in 1987.

The event first came to Harvard in 1996 and has also come to be a fixture on college campuses nationwide.

This year’s program was funded with the help of the Ann Radcliffe Trust, Harvard Foundation, the Undergraduate Council and University Health Services.

—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.