“She doesn’t let me hang out with my friends. She says she should be enough.”
This is one of six messages written on posters around Grounds for the Red Flag Campaign, an awareness campaign launched through the Women’s Center. The campaign attempts to draw attention to the problem of intimate partner violence, as October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
According to the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, one partner is being abused in one out of every five college dating relationships. Many people associate domestic violence with physical abuse, but the Red Flag Campaign is trying to demonstrate that violence is not always physical — it can be emotional, too. The posters place an emphasis on identifying the differences between healthy and unhealthy relationships as well as signs of abusive behavior, including coercion, sexual assault, isolation, jealousy, emotional abuse and victim-blaming.
Many young people find it hard to identify violence in their relationships because serious relationships can be a new experience.
“It’s hard for some students to distinguish how you should be treated, especially in college relationships, because they’ve never done it before,” said third-year College student Katie Gorman, the sexual and domestic violence services outreach intern at the Women’s Center. National statistics support this idea: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 16- to 24-year-old women experience the highest per capita rates of intimate violence, at a rate almost triple the national average.
In light of these facts, the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance decided to embark on the Red Flag Campaign to raise awareness about these issues where they are widespread: on college campuses.
Claire Kaplan, director of sexual and domestic violence services at the Women’s Center and who also helped shape the Red Flag Campaign as part of the initial development committee, said planning for the campus awareness program started three years ago with a grant from the Verizon Foundation. A campus task force comprised of students, personnel and community-victim advocates developed the materials and vetted them past student groups. Last year the University hosted a focus group in which students provided feedback about the stalking content of the campaign.
A variety of campuses across Virginia participate in this campaign, and the program is slowly spreading to become a national initiative.
Campaign advocates are hanging up posters around Grounds, distributing flag pens that list qualities of healthy relationships and planting red flags around Grounds to remind students of the intimate-partner violence problem. What distinguishes this campaign from other awareness campaigns, Kaplan said, is its ability to speak to third parties.
Both Kaplan and Gorman said friends and family of a victim are often the first ones to come forward about intimate violence, which is one of the reasons why the posters have not just examples of red flag behavior, but “talk boxes” that respond to those behaviors. “It empowers people to act,” Kaplan said. The campaign is “not just speaking to victims, it tells a third party, ‘You can do something, too,’”
Warrenetta Mann, multicultural coordinator at Counseling and Psychological Services, praised these sorts of awareness campaigns.
“Campaigns [like this] give individuals things they can do and actions they can take in everyday life to have a specific impact,” she said, noting domestic violence is “something growing amongst younger people and couples that lots of college counseling centers are worried about. I think it’s good that students are addressing it within their own community.”
While the campaign is focused primarily on raising awareness, Kaplan reiterated the importance of peer education groups in the process and how they are expected to educate the student body. University students developed a forum to discuss these issues yesterday in the Kaleidoscope Room in Newcomb Hall.
Fourth-year College student Evelyn Hall, co-chair of the Sexual Assault Leadership Council, said a representative from the Shelter for Help in Emergency gave a broad overview of domestic violence by defining it and giving signs and instructions about how to help a friend. The second half of the forum was a panel in which survivors of domestic violence shared their personal stories. The variety of panelists, Hall said, highlighted non-traditional forms of domestic violence and allowed attendees to understand the effects abuse can have on students’ broader experiences at the University.
“The panel is an opportunity to gain very private insight on intimate partner violence experience of peers; it provides key insights about issues that are often swept under the rug,” she said. “Hearing personal stories is one of the most influential ways to change perspectives.”
The work done by student education groups and the awareness campaigns attempts to bring light to a situation that Kaplan said students “may not even recognize because of a normalized environment.”
Gorman agreed that people think intimate partner abuse “is a private issue,” she said. “But you need to speak up. You need to say ‘I don’t think he’s treating you right, you deserve better than this.’”
Kaplan said for an aggressor to hear someone else speak about intimate partner abuse “is amazing — way more than I can do. This [campaign] makes people feel good that there is something they can do.”
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