By Lyrica Gee
Walking through the back hallway of the second floor of the Hicks Center, the idle music that echoes throughout the building falls away. In place of the loud chatter of the central hub, quiet conversations drift into the halls from small offices.
In one such space, Haley Mangette, faculty advisor for Sexual Peer Education Alliance at K (SPEAK), sits preparing as much as possible for the first week of spring term, which will kick off a month of events recognizing April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM).
SPEAK is an organization through Student Development that seeks to supply knowledge, support, and advocacy on the issues of sexual and relationship violence through peer education.
On the Kalamazoo College campus, between 2020 and 2022, only one instance of dating violence and two instances of stalking. No occurrences of domestic violence were reported. However, these numbers from Campus safety only account for incidents occurring on campus and do not account for those that go unreported. In contrast, SPEAK’s 2021-2022 Sexual Climate Survey anecdotally reported that 27 percent of those surveyed experienced unwanted sexual contact, 12 percent experienced stalking, and seven percent experienced intimate partner violence.
The state of Michigan reports that around 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are targets of attempted or completed sexual assault during their time as college students. The University of Michigan’s 2019 findings showed that only 27 percent of men survivors and 25 percent of women survivors surveyed said they reported the sexual misconduct they experienced.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), at a national level, 13 percent of all college students experience rape or sexual assault. Only 20 percent of the female student victims polled reported to law enforcement.
With this in mind, the results of campus study are likely not comprehensive.
SPEAK seeks to educate students about the intricacies of sexual and relationship violence throughout the year. One tool they use to acknowledge is the recognition of awareness months such as January’s Stalking Awareness Month and October’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Most notably, the month of April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) for which SPEAK is juggling various collaborations across campus in order to broaden the reach of their month-long programming.
So far this month, they have hosted a reflection with Students for Reproductive Freedom (SRF) and a cathartic rotten food-smashing excursion with Community Compost. These programs represent the two sides of the coin for which SPEAK focuses its efforts: education through meaningful reflection and activity that promotes survivor-minded healing and healthy expression of emotions.
In putting together event schedules and collaborations, SPEAK falls back on a few key tactics to shape the goals of its programming.
First, they review anecdotal information from the student body as well as surveys regarding campus social climate. The Sexual Assault Climate Survey was last reported for the 2021-2022 school year. Its results were used to identify problem-areas on campus that made students feel unsafe or unheard.
Mangette said that this process “focuses our focus, for lack of a better term. Like if we have a higher number of one sort of violence, we’ll say ‘ok, clearly we’re missing something, maybe we need to address that a little bit more.’”
Second, they consider their evidence-based approaches. They employ strategies that are statistically-proven in their positive effect. For example, the National Institute of Justice examined bystander intervention programs and proved that it broadened knowledge of sexual violence, reduced rape-myth acceptance, and bettered bystander behavior. SPEAK continues hosting bystander intervention education – which teaches students to take action and intervene in times of need – based on scientific data that proved it successful in its mission.
Lastly, SPEAK takes into account the level of interaction and engagement from the student body. Mangette said she regularly asks herself “What are some different intriguing activities that we can do that we can tie a prevention message to or tie something that we’re really trying to instill in people?”
One primary way that they accomplish this is by targeting survivors’ needs with their programming. The most critical event of SAAM is the Take Back the Night speak-out, which provides a safe space for survivors to share their stories.
Take Back the Night has been a campus staple since the 1960s. In the past, SPEAK would take submissions of survivors’ stories beforehand. Within the last couple of years, it has transitioned to an open mic format, with some stories still submitted anonymously for members of Mangette’s team to perform in the survivors’ stead. She has found that relying on the open mic allows hesitant survivors to gain the courage in the event’s safe space to decide in the moment that they would like to share.
“We’ve had people who said ‘I’ve never talked about this before with anyone. This is the first time I’ve ever said anything here.’ And we’ve had people who’ve talked about this multiple times, but it felt like the place to say it again,” Mangette said.
For the past two years, Abbigail McMillian, ‘24, another SPEAK intern, has been the primary student leader for the event. She had the privilege of opening the event with survivor love letters. The letters are an opportunity for survivors and supporters alike to “write whatever’s on their chest, whatever’s on their heart, or create a piece of art to go with the love letter,” McMillian said.
These resources live on for survivors to find comfort in reading year-round.
“If you look up survivor love letters, if you just Google it, Kalamazoo College’s archive is the first thing to pop up and I think that’s so special,” McMillian said. “It’s not just for the K community but for anybody in the world who has gone through those experiences, who is looking for any sort of support, who might feel alone or isolated, they can look that up and it’s there.”
Throughout SPEAK’s history, this value of advocating for survivors has oscillated throughout organizational transitions.
The peer support program started in 2012 as a student-led group – Sexual Safety and Support Alliance (S3A) – partnered with the counseling center. They sought to provide a student resource alternative to the institutional mandated reporters. They ran into problems when their volunteers had to acclimate to extreme hours and emotionally taxing work.
“We did sexual assault awareness stuff, but our main job was to be a resource for the campus, specifically after health center hours, so on weekends and at night,” said Ellie Grossman, ‘18, who joined as a sophomore at K in 2015.
Posters were put up around campus that displayed S3A members’ photos along with their phone numbers. The group’s volunteers would get calls or text messages when students wanted to safely share their stories or to request pregnancy tests or Plan B.
The emotionally taxing bit of their position was the hotline that they ran. Students who experienced or were in proximity to sexual assault were able to call the hotline any time of day to confide in a peer.
The responsibility took an emotional toll on volunteers. Grossman remembered juggling the late night and weekend interruptions with her academic duties.
“I’d be in the middle of studying and somebody would call,” Grossman said. “It was definitely a lot. Because also you just didn’t know what you were gonna walk in on. And there’s only so much you can do.”
In her junior year, Grossman studied abroad. Upon her return in January 2017, she was involved in discussions with then-Title IX coordinator Ellen Collier regarding the purpose of S3A and its success on campus. Title IX is the basis of the campus’s Office of Gender Equity which oversees and coordinates compliance with laws pertaining to discrimination and harassment.
As Title IX coordinator, Collier proposed an S3A transition to a peer education-focused program, naming it Sexual Peer Educators Alliance at K (SPEAK) to emphasize the switch. This required less emotional labor of the students.
The organization adopted different constraints under this new supervision, especially in the neutrality of their programming. Grossman said, under Title IX, “SPEAK couldn’t be the ones who put on Take Back the Night because that was, this is going to sound ridiculous but this was how it worked, that was considered taking a stance. Standing with survivors is not neutral.”
Their work shifted from the mission of supporting survivors to providing information to the student body regarding Title IX legislation and policies.
In September 2018, K College received a $298,698 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women. The money was designated to SPEAK and from that, Haley Mangette was hired as faculty advisor for the program. Its ties to the Office of Gender Equity were severed so they could refocus on both prevention work and supporting survivors. This also allowed for peer educators to become paid positions.
When the grant expired in September 2022, the college continued to support SPEAK with funding. This maintained Mangette’s position and allowed her to continue paying interns who would act as her go-to people in SPEAK operations.
As a staple in the student development office, they finally balanced their dual goals of peer education and meaningful support.
With three years of SPEAK peer education under her belt, SPEAK intern McMillian hosts weekly office hours in the Student Development department throughout the year. She uses this time to complete tasks assigned by Mangette and support students looking for institutional assistance.
Mangette has been with SPEAK for four and a half years. As the interns’ advisor, she provides training to peer educators on the nuances of education and prevention of sexual and relationship violence.
She recalled that the transition to a standalone group allowed for more creativity and flexibility in SPEAK’s implementation of their mission. They were able to return to their roots in advocating for students and providing support for survivors of sexual and relationship violence.
Mangette pays special attention to the planning of Take Back the Night because it stands out as the most powerful manifestations of her work. SPEAK was not always the leading force in organizing SAAM. When asked how that came to be, Mangette shyly said, “Me.”
She said that this type of prevention work drives her passion that one day her position will no longer be needed.
“I always tell people at the end of the prevention stuff that I do that prevention is a community effort. It can’t be done by my office, by just SPEAK, by just Tanya in the Title IX office, by just a small group of people or a single person,” Mangette said. “It has to be done by an entire community in order to eliminate it. And so I always tell people, ‘Help me eradicate my job.’”
Until then, Mangette said, she will keep pushing and raising awareness because there are still people who need her efforts. April is just one of twelve months in the year that she pours herself into the work of raising awareness in her community.
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