<< Front page Commentary April 23, 2004

SAST’s history important

To the Editors:

I am writing as a person who worked with the Sexual Assault Support Team from the fall of 2000 through the fall of 2002. I would like to congratulate those SAST members who have had the wisdom and foresight to shut down the hotline and temporarily stop providing SAST’s usual array of services until SAST as an organization can address long-standing internal issues: accessibility to people of color and incorporation of anti-racism to organizational structure, mission and goals.

I can understand why the hotline counselors this year might feel frustrated. However, they must understand that they are part of a larger history of failed attempts to make resources available to members of the college community whose access to resources is already extremely limited: students of color, especially women and trans people of color.

It is unfair of these hotline counselors, all of whom are white, most of whom have only recently gotten involved with SAST, to expect that they will have complete control of the hotline without regard to the history of labor that has gone into transforming this organization, and without regard to the quality of services they are able to provide.

While McKeever and Tinkelman claimed that they feel disrespected, it is my opinion that they are the ones who are being disrespectful: they have ignored women of color who have repeatedly told them that the hotline, and SAST generally, is inaccessible.

They stopped attending SAST’s organizational meetings, signaling their complete refusal to even engage with other members of the organization regarding the direction and quality of services. They have repeatedly asserted that their “feelings” are more important than the ongoing exclusion of people of color from resources they need to survive. SAST has made a conscientious and incredibly wise decision to stop funding the hotline until these issues can be addressed.

I am sympathetic to the feeling expressed in the Review last week that this decision places some students in a difficult place regarding access to resources.

I would like to point out that SAST, as a student organization, has traditionally provided a huge amount of training, education, counseling and advocacy that “it is not our job as students to provide.”

I, too, am angry, but I am NOT angry with the student organizers in SAST who are struggling to make the services they offer meaningful and available to everybody. Instead, I am angry at Nancy Dye, for commissioning a “taskforce” instead of taking concrete action, at Camille Hamlin Allen, who is incapable of administering the sexual offense policy and provides virtually no education for the campus (something that is in her job description) and with Peter Goldsmith, who cut two student worker positions of Sexual Violence Education and Prevention coordinators after only one semester.

As for SAST: it’s about time! The path ahead, of overhauling and transforming an organization with more than a 10-year history on campus, will necessarily be a long and difficult one. I hope it is a path SAST is able to take, and that the misinformed backlash evidenced by the hotline counselors’ reaction will not interfere with the important work that remains.

–Jesse Carr
College senior


 
 
   

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