Front Range Community College is marking April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month by sponsoring events to educate and engage the public about the issue of sexual assault.
The FRCC- Boulder County Campus student group Feminist Uprising Collective is scheduled to offer a virtual resource fair on April 15, 1-2:30 p.m. Ten community organizations will introduce students and other attendees in small breakout sessions to the types of services and resources they offer, according to a FRCC news release.
Organizations from Boulder Valley Women’s Health to Safe Shelter will talk about services, with the event culminating in a group Q&A session, the news release states.
FRCC is also hosting a virtual Take Back the Night (TBtN) event April 22, 5-6:30 p.m. that will be live-streamed and open to the public. In addition to hosting several speakers, Feminist Uprising Collective representatives will announce the winner of the TBtN Student Art Contest, in which students submitted written, visual and performance work related to sexual violence, the new release states.
FRCC faculty members Catlyn Keenan, Mary Ann Grim and Amy Mann co-sponsor the Feminist Uprising Collective at FRCC’s Boulder County Campus, organizes the annual TBtN event.
Take Back the Night is the earliest worldwide effort to combat sexual violence and violence against women, according to a FRCC blog post about the upcoming events.
The first march was in 1972 at the University of Southern Florida where a group of women advocated for resources and safety for women.
Grim states in the blog that TBtN and all of its events and programs bring essential awareness to students and the FRCC community.
“Sexual assault on college campuses is a big problem and a topic that we as a college need to address and talk about,” Grim said. “Catlyn (Keenan) and I and our amazing members of our student group feel a responsibility to our community to host this and other events and offer a safe space for people to discuss difficult, uncomfortable topics like sexual violence.”
The American Association of University Professors has said “campus sexual assault is a significant problem.”
Women in the traditional age range for college students — from 18 to 21 — are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women in any other age group, and college-bound women are at greater risk than their non-college-bound peers, according to the AAUP.
FRCC’s TBtN Speakers include:
Janine D’Anniballe, Ph.D. - Dr. D’Anniballe is a licensed psychologist and nationally recognized expert in sexual assault and trauma stress, and treatmet for survivors. She is the director of trauma services at Mental Health Partners in Lafayette and has been the director of Moving to End Sexual Assault (MESA), the rape crisis center serving Boulder County for 20 years.
Shay Castle - Castle is a survivor of sexual assault and journalist whose work has appeared in The Denver Post, Colorado Sun and The New York Times. She spent 6.5 years with the Boulder Daily Camera. Castle launched Boulder Beat in 2019.
David Konter - Konter is a Boulder resident who is involved in Men Standing up, a MESA program that presents to students in local schools and members of community groups about how to end sexual assault, harassment and other forms of violence against women.
