The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Commentary February 25, 2005

College needs assault hotline

Returning to campus after Winter Term, many students may have noticed signs posted by Safety and Security notifying the community of an alleged rape that occurred in Dascomb on Feb. 2. The signs provided a brief description of the assailant and urged students to exercise caution at all times, but gave little in the way of concrete details.

Coincidentally, this past week the Office of Health and Life Skills Education sponsored a series of workshops whose purpose was to raise awareness of incidents of sexual assault on campus, provide information on the prevention of sexual assault, promote understanding of the consent policy and provide a forum to encourage dialogue about healthy communication and relationships.

These workshops, in combination with the new support group for survivors of sexual assault sponsored by the counseling center, are new resources on campus geared toward educating students about issues of sexual consent.

These resources are helpful, but a void exists in the College’s network of resources for victims of sexual assault. The Sexual Assault Support Team (SAST) used to fill that void. SAST is an autonomous student activist group dedicated to sexual assault issues. The SAST charter states that one of the purposes of the group is to provide a 24-hour, anonymous, confidential hotline for students who are victims of sexual assault. Last year, the group shut down the hotline, citing internal organizational problems as the cause.

While at the time it was reported that training programs for counselors were going to be revamped to ensure accessibility to all victims of assault, there has been no publicized indication that this has been happening. The SAST ExCo, which had been the previous method of training for SAST counselors, has not been taught since fall 2003.

One provision in the SAST mission statement includes work in campus and community outreach and education. SAST once sponsored events and workshops with the purpose of promoting awareness of and counseling for sexual assault. Now, these events have all but disappeared from Oberlin’s campus. Yet the fact remains that SAST is still listed as an active student organization. Members of SAST declined to comment on the current status of the group’s activity.

SAST provided a unique and valuable service to the College community. The fact that the counselors were Oberlin students made the hotline distinctive from other national and regional hotlines such as the Lorain County hotline, run by the Nord Foundation, because SAST counselors knew about policies and services specific to Oberlin.

This immediacy, combined with the fact that it was always available, was another unique quality of the SAST hotline, a quality that is not replicated by the new student support group. There is currently no resource available that fulfills the specific set of needs that the hotline once provided.

Some action must be taken. SAST has a responsibility to the College community to provide the services it purports to in its charter. If reorganization is in order, it is SAST’s duty to keep the students informed of the progress and steps that are being taken. If it cannot, then it should cease to be an active student organization. If SAST cannot provide a crisis hotline for victims of sexual assault on this campus then another group or the Oberlin administration itself must.
 
 

   


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