WASHINGTON — The White House launched an ambitious campaign Friday aimed at ending sexual assaults on college campuses, in part by enlisting major college sports leagues and prominent celebrities to get men involved in the effort.
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launched the initiative, called “It’s On Us,” at an event in the White House East Room. Lilly Jay, a student at Amherst College who introduced Biden, spoke in stark personal terms about what it meant to be raped and the difficulty of trying to “reclaim college” afterward.
“Recalling rape always hurts,” she said, adding that having those she called “allies” decry sexual assault makes things easier. “They help carry the heavy truth that colleges can, and should, be safer.”
Obama assured Jay, “This is not your fight alone. This is on all of us, every one of us, to fight campus sexual assault.
“We’ve got to have a fundamental shift in our culture” to prevent future assaults, the president said. “And it’s not just on the parents of young women to caution them. It is on the parents of young men to teach them respect for women.”
Biden, who scheduled a roundtable discussion on domestic violence Friday afternoon in Denver, addressed part of his remarks directly to men, declaring, “So step up, you guys. Speak out.”
“It’s on all of us to change the culture that asks the wrong questions, and our culture still asks the wrong questions,” he added, his voice growing louder as he got more emotional. “It is never the right question for a woman to ask, ‘What did I do?’ Never. Get this straight: Never is it appropriate for a woman to ask, ‘What did I do?’ The question is, ‘Why was that done to me, and will someone do something about it?’”
One in five women will be sexually assaulted while enrolled in college, many of them during their first year by someone they know, according to authoritative studies.
The first 15 weeks of college can be the riskiest. The group Futures Without Violence just launched “The Other Freshman 15,” a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting college and university officials to address that issue.
Lonna Davis, who directs the group’s children and youth program and attended Friday’s event with her 16-year-old daughter, said the White House was taking an approach with men “to invite them, and not indict them, into the conversation, which is exactly what we need.”
As part of the administration’s new effort, the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women will also award more than $6 million in grants to 18 colleges to develop comprehensive campus sexual assault prevention and response programs.
Student leaders from nearly 200 U.S. colleges and universities have agreed to participate in the campaign, operating in coordination with Generation Progress, a division of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. It will have its own brand and logo, which can be adapted for individual campuses.
Several prominent celebrities will participate in public service announcements aimed at enlisting public support for the campaign, administration officials said, including Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love and actors Jon Hamm and Connie Britton. A slew of other organizations, including the NCAA; the Big Ten Conference; the Atlantic 10 Conference; the U.S. Olympic Committee; Viacom; Tumblr; the American Association of University Women; and Electronic Arts, a leading video gaming firm, have also endorsed the initiative and will feature it prominently in online advertising and in other venues.