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A recently awarded grant will allow the Auraria Campus Safety Initiative to provide better programming for prevention, awareness, and victim services in cases of interpersonal violence.
The U.S. Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women gave $500,000 to the Safety Initiative, a partnership organization that involves all three schools at the Auraria Campus, the Auraria Higher Education Center, and community organizations interested in preventing and aiding victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
Barbara Paradiso, director of the Program and Center on Domestic Violence at the UC Denver School of Public Affairs, said funds will go to create victim services programs, including a 24 hour crisis intervention hotline, and to increase awareness of interpersonal violence. The grant will be distributed over the next three years.
The program will permit the creation of two new positions in the Program and Center on Domestic Violence that will review and develop policies, protocols, and services for individuals exposed to interpersonal violence. Funding will also go to Auraria Campus Police to allow them to provide greater support for victims of interpersonal violence.
"This initiative is a priority," said Police Chief John Mackey. "It's something that tugs at the hearts of many of us."
The project began four years ago when Birgit Moran, a Metropolitan State College journalism student, led the launch of "Love, Sex, and Lies: An Intimacy Checkup" to offer screenings for domestic violence as well as counseling sessions for victims of abuse.
Moran said seeing the Safety Initiative receive this grant reminded her, as this program has since its beginning, that people do have the power to make a difference.
"I'll never forget after the first 'Love, Sex, and Lies' event, when we were blown away by how many people came, and the euphoria at seeing how people reacted and realizing that it probably will make a difference," she said.
The 2008 screening on campus found that of 900 participants, 10 percent had experienced some form of violence in their current or most recent relationship, and 5 percent had experienced sexual violence.
According to the Department of Justice, women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of intimate partner violence. Of the 43,000 students at the Auraria Campus, 24,533 of them are women, most of whom are under 28 years old.
During a press conference to announce the grant award last Tuesday, Elise Hudson, a graduate student in Public Affairs, spoke about her experience as a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault. Hudson is a year and a half into her graduate studies and saw her ex-boyfriend, the offender, on campus this past semester. After seeing him, she switched to as many online classes as possible and began making use of the electronic library instead of the campus stacks.
"Now when I come on campus, I look over my shoulder," she said. "I tremble. I shake. I never come to campus alone if I can help it."
In a later email, Hudson added, "One of the key misconceptions about domestic violence and sexual assault is that the victim does something to provoke it. There is no action to which sexual assault is an acceptable reaction. There is no action to which physical violence is an acceptable reaction (except maybe self-preservation).If some outreach program had told me that the problem wasn't all my fault, and that it wasn't OK (and sometimes wasn't legal) for someone to do or say those things to me, then I probably would have stood up for myself much sooner than I did."
The Safety Initiative will draw partners from both the Auraria campus and the Denver community. In total, 27 organizations, including student organizations from all three schools on campus, the Auraria Campus Police Department, and external organizations will be involved. Community organizations include the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Denver District Attorney's Office, SafeHouse Denver, Rape Assistance and Awareness Program, Project Safeguard, Denver Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, and the Colorado Anti-Violence Program.
"The greatest challenge was working with all four institutions to bring everybody on board," said Paradiso. "Part of the application…was making sure all levels of administration believe in and supported what we are doing and we had a very short amount of time to do that in."
The administration, she said, has provided tremendous support.
"We were very impressed with the collaboration [Barbara Paradiso] was able to attain," said Steve Monaco, director of the Health Center at Auraria, one of the project partners.
"A lot of the time we're going to be the front line," said Paul Schadler, Medical Director for the Health Center. "We're going to be where victims are identified. So to have the support of the whole campus is very exciting."
Paradiso said the nature of a commuter campus necessitated some of the community cooperation. "One of our major goals is to put together a coordinated response, but we know we can't do it alone. We're conscious that we have to build strong relationships with the community to do a good job."
In putting together the Safety Initiative's advisory council, which also draws members from all three institutions and from the community, Paradiso said the "goal was to ensure we had a group of people that represented all groups on campus. We didn't want to see some imbalance develop. We're very different institutions with very different priorities."
Paradiso said the Center staff finished interviews for the two positions they're looking to fill before beginning the assessment of campus procedures and protocols last week, and plans to make offers by the end of this week. Once the positions are filled, they'll be looking at existing policies like the sexual assault policy that went into effect last year to use as a model, and will decide where to move forward from there. The Safety Initiative is also working on acquiring space, and recently applied for an opening in the Tivoli.
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