SlutWalkers March Against Shame & Blame

Chanting, ​“Feminists unite. Reclaim the night! SlutWalk!” a band of Southern Connecticut State University students and faculty marched through the center of campus — and into school history.

Organized by graduate students in the SCSU Women’s Studies program and the campus Violence Prevention, Victim Advocacy and Support Center, the ​“SlutWalk” marchers Thursday joined the international movement to take back the world ​“slut” and end the way it is used to stigmatize sexuality and shame victims of sexual violence, particularly for women and those engaged in non-heteronormative sexual activity.

“It goes back to rape culture, which is the environment where rape is prevalent and normalized in everything,” said Lindsay DeFrancisco, a counselor and advocate with the Meriden-based Women and Families Center. She moderated a pre-SlutWalk panel at which advocates and survivors talked about how victim shaming and blaming are perpetuated, and about strategies for changing the narrative and leaving the stigma where it belongs — with the perpetrator of sexual violence.

DeFrancisco said when it comes to ​“slut-shaming,” there is a gender specific double standard, especially when it comes to language.

“Guys are encouraged, especially on college campuses, to get as many girls as you can,” she said. ​“But if a woman does it, she’s considered a slut.”

She said even before a woman has her first sexual encounter, society imposes certain rules on her that men don’t have to deal with.

An example? Dress codes in middle and high school aimed at governing the length of girls’ skirts and shorts among other things so that they won’t be ​“a distraction” to the boys.

Christina Fawcett, a Women’s Studies graduate student and one of the event’s lead organizers, said there remains a stigma around talking about sex and sexuality. She said it’s time to normalize those conversations to make sure that whatever kind of sex someone is having, it is consensual and safe.

Fawcett, who also works as a clinical assistant at Planned Parenthood, said she sees patients all the time who have a hard time talking about sex because they are afraid they are being judged.

“People are embarrassed, and they have nothing to be embarrassed about if you’re being safe and consensual,” she said.

Albert Cifuentes Jr., a 2009 SCSU graduate and community health advocate, advocated a pending state affirmative consent bill, which would require people to get a ​“yes” before engaging in sexual activity on campuses. Cifuentes, a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a man he considered a friend and occasional sexual partner, said it took him a long time to recognize what happened to him as rape; that it was not his fault; and that there was nothing he could or should have done to prevent it from happening.

Cathy Christy, director of the SCSU Violence Prevention, Victim Advocacy and Support Center, said all kinds of messaging pervade popular culture and media around sex, sexuality and sexual violence. She said young men and women have a responsibility to challenge it.

Surveys at SCSU show that 81 percent of students want to intervene when it comes to sexual assault, she said.

The center works with students to help them understand consent and the importance of having a clear green light for every sexual encounter — meaning the person has said that he or she wants to have sex with you, at a particular time and in a particular way, and that you are not intoxicated or otherwise unable to make an informed decision. And getting that consent whether a person is in a relationship or not, or whether you’ve had sex with that person before or not.

Vanessa Young, another women’s studies graduate student at SCSU, said one way to challenge harmful perceptions is to speak up about your experience. She pointed to how rape victims on other college campuses have fought back against the culture of victim blaming, shaming and attempts to silence their voices.

“The girl at Columbia with the mattress … was in a relationship and claiming that she was anally raped, and a lot of people had a big issue with that,” Young said, of a student who alleged that she had been raped by a male friend. The male friend was never criminally charged, and a university investigation ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing, but the fallout for both students and the university has been tremendous. ​“That was her whole hearing, where the question was ​‘If they were in a relationship, was it rape?’ And the answer is yes.

“We see this all the time at Ivy League institutions. You look at Yale. You look at Columbia. They claim they have less than 2 percent of sexual assaults, and it’s just literally impossible for their size. I’m really happy that Southern has been tackling this, and I I feel good going to a school that really cares about this stuff.”

Young said she couldn’t imagine attending a school like Yale — which was recently embroiled in an alleged sexual assault case involving the now expelled captain of its men’s basketball team — and being silenced.

“These are the people that are going to be running our country,” she said. ​“If they’re taught silence from that, how does it affect our culture, how does that affect our society, how does that affect media? I was talking to a male co-worker of mine who said, ​‘Who’s to say that that girl who says she was raped can ruin that guy’s life who has this big scholarship?’ Well, did she ruin his life? Or did he make a bad decision and ruin his own life?”