Ariana Isabel Duckett
News Editor
On April 24, Associated Students Take Back the Night (TBTN) hosted a rally for sexual assault awareness in Little Acorn Park. TBTN collaborated with Students Against Sexual Assault (SASA); the Women’s Center; Campus, Advocacy, Resources, and Education (CARE); and Standing Together To End Sexual Assault (STESA), a non-profit based in Santa Barbara.
Professor Elinor Mason from the UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) philosophy department began the rally’s activities with a speech on sexual violence, both celebrating and lamenting the presence of UCSB organizations against sexual assault. Given that sexual violence is “baked into the structure of a patriarchal society,” Professor Mason said that society must “move towards more equality at every stage.”
Professor Mason recognized how “we still have to be protesting about sexual violence,” even though “we’ve been doing this for so long.”
According to Karla Huizar, a Community Education Coordinator at STESA who tabled at the rally, “It’s really important for survivors to see how supported they are, in order for survivors to heal properly.” Supporting survivors includes making them feel “believed, where they’re going to be listened to, [and] where they’re going to be met with empathy and compassion” as opposed to facing shame and blame alone.
STESA aspires to educate and raise awareness about sexual violence in the Santa Barbara area, with the ultimate goal of ending it altogether. In addition to events like the rally, which “empowers” survivors and gives them “hope,” according to Huizar, community members can also learn more information about sexual assault.
“Sexual violence doesn’t only affect women statistically, [though] the majority of sexual assault cases are women. However, that’s only what’s been reported,” Huizar said.
Several groups, including STESA, TBTN, CARE, and UCSB administrators and professors, are collaborating on a project titled Raise the Bar, which, according to Huizar, centers “around bringing education to the correlation of overconsumption of alcohol and sexual violence.” Though drinking alcohol does not automatically signify that an individual is a perpetrator or will be perpetrated, “there is a correlation between people who are those perpetrators that use alcohol as a tool to facilitate a sexual assault,” Huizar said, which “our community is not very aware of.” Ultimately, Raise the Bar aims to encourage safe drinking habits by educating community members about the implications of overdrinking.
According to Professor Mason, individuals may not actively consider the implications and reality of sexual assault until it impacts them personally. “It jumps out and bites you,” Professor Mason said. Once an assault occurs, “it’s hard to be heard, hard to find the words” for what has happened.
The rally additionally included live music, henna art, print-making, and catering of In-N-Out and donuts. TBTN co-chair Evelyn Stacy explained how TBTN became defunct during COVID-19, and that the rally was important to hold since this is TBTN’s first full year back.
“An event like this … reaches a lot of people and is able to like, get a lot of interest and generate a lot of attention,” Stacy said. “And so it brings in a lot of people and we’re able to get our message out and to, like, a large crowd.”