Myrianna Bakou
Darrin Smith
Damien Pfister
COMM 250
April 25th 2016
Common
Campaign Portfolio
To view our Commons Campaign, please click the link below:
Original Proposal
Our commons campaign addresses sexual crimes
and violence on campus and how universities address them. In our proposal as
well as in our campaign, we will be referring to The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape on American campuses.
The documentary is very eye-opening in terms of how little American
universities do to protect victims of sexual crimes. Many college campuses go
far and wide to hide sexual crimes from the public or even bring awareness to
them because they fear losing students hence, losing money. Because they do so
little to bring awareness to sexual crimes and violence on campus they in tern
protect the people committing the crimes, often letting them off the hook
without repercussion. Because of this, victims of sexual violence often feel
unsupported, shamed, blamed, and sometimes outright ignored when they come out
and speak their truth. The documentary focuses on how victims of sexual
violence have stood up over the years, demanding something be done. While
watching the documentary, we were equally inspired and wanted to bring the
awareness to our own campus. We believe that victims of sexual violence should
receive justice and not forced to hide the truth. We understand how difficult
it is for students who have been violated to come out and relive the event.
However, we strongly believe that those students should be supported by
university campuses.
Because of how controversial this topic is,
we understand that there might be some constraints as far as communicating with
the staff at UNL and trying to bring greater awareness to sexual violence on
our campus. Although some people might jump on the wagon and do everything that
they can to help us and support us in any way that they can, we also
hypothesize there might be some backlash. That is because we are specifically
addressing the lack of support that universities provide for students who have
suffered from sexual assault. Our
audiences is anyone that attends UNL whether that be students, professors,
deans or chancellors. This is a great opportunity to educate everyone on sexual
crimes but also to help people be more aware of the effect that sexual violence
has on our students. Furthermore, we’d like to reiterate that sexual violence is
never the victim’s fault.
A lot of the things that we will be doing for
our project is self-made, making it creative and giving our campaign a unique
feel. Since we want to be credible, we’ve done a lot of research, and cited
those sources to provide additional reference for our audience. We also want to
be fair, and unbiased so part of our research involve interviewing different
people on campus about sexual crimes and violence both regarding UNL and
college campuses in general. Some of the people that we plan on interviewing
are as followed: staff in the women center, staff in the title nine office,
hopefully, the dean of students and maybe even a student who has experienced
sexual violence on this campus. If we interview a student who has experienced
sexual violence on campus, we will ask them how the university handled it and
how supported they felt by the university. Because this is a very personal
thing, we will find ways to be discreet and protect the identity of the student
in any way we can. Aside from interviewing people (which will be recorded), we
will also make informative pamphlets about sexual crimes on college campuses
and create a blog. We will hand out the pamphlets both in class and in the
Union, and the blog will be our overall project. Anything else we do for our
campaign will be on the blog.
What We
Did
The
first thing that we did was rewatch the documentary several times. We studied
it and took notes on things that we wanted to cover during our blog. We also
did additional research, finding more information that has have been published
about sexual assault on college campuses. We viewed other blogs and websites
that brought awareness to the issues. Reviewing other blogs and websites really
helped us because it allowed us to see what worked and what didn’t. It also
helped us figure out which direction we should take our own project. Once we
collected our information, we then made a scheduled outline detailing what and
when something should be accomplished. Our timeline was included in our initial
proposal. The next thing that we did was discuss who would be responsible for
what. Darrin was responsible for doing the flyer, and I was responsible for the
video. We both agreed that we would work on adding information to the blog
either on our own time and when our schedule permitted we would do it together.
Intervention
The
most challenging part of our blog was the video. Dr. Jan Deed is the director of
the Women’s Center and the associate director of UNL Student Involvement. She agreed
to do a brief interview with me in which I asked her several questions regarding
sexual assault, specifically on how our university handles sexual misconduct.
In the interview, she talks briefly about the documentary that inspired our
project. Deed continues by going into detail about a conference she recently
attended that focused on providing faculties with the information needed when
dealing with sexual misconduct on campus. Dr. Deed told us that the movie The Hunting Ground was one of the
contributing factors behind this conference. She also addressed the benefits of
using the Women’s Center, which is one of the many resources available to
student here at UNL. The Women’s Center provide many resources for not only for
women, but men as well. One important benefit of using the Women’s Center is free
counseling for students.
Originally,
our plan was to interview someone in the title nine office because they’re the
ones who primarily deals with sexual misconduct. Unfortunately, we had a hard
time figuring out exactly who to contact, once we finally found out, they would
not respond to our request. We also were interested in interviewing students
who were victims of sexual assault, but we quickly realized that that wouldn’t
work for two reasons. One, we had no way of knowing who victims of sexual
assault were and we couldn’t ask the Women’s Center or the UNL Health Center
because we knew they would not disclose the information. It also would have been
a little weird, not to mention how creepy going around and asking a person such
emotional questions would be. The second reason was that we also didn’t want to
really expose any students for safety reasons. It is possible that some
students would have wanted to share their stories, but we just had no real way
of doing this. Since the title nine office didn’t get back to use, we decided
to interview Dr. Deed, who is also very knowledgeable about the topic. We also
wanted to interview Dr. Sarah Gervais, who does research regarding sexual
assault on campus, and Kevin Rush who is an RD in Pound Hall. Unfortunately Dr.
Gervais was traveling, so we couldn’t find a time that worked to interview her
and upon talking to Kevin, we realized that he does not really deal with sexual
misconduct often so he wouldn’t really be able to tell us more about how the
issue is dealt with on our campus. Another thing that we didn’t really do a
good job on was following the schedule that we made for ourselves. Although we
got everything done, we didn’t follow the schedule. We also weren't able to distribute the leaflets that we made due to lack of time. If we had to do this project all over again, we would really work on getting the blog on other social media channels so that more people can see it.
Reflection
Even
though we had difficulty finding people to interview, the video itself was the
most successful part of our blog. It is the highlight of the blog and was
edited well despite some initial issues with editing. Another thing that I
think really work was the videos that are posted throughout the blog as well as
the images. They emphasize the points that we are trying to make. The video of
the documentary summarizes our research, our own video compares how we deal
with sexual misconduct compare to other universities, and the last video at the
end emphasizes how easy and straightforward consent is and how ridiculous it is
when people don’t understand it. I strongly believe that the last video is the
perfect clincher and conclusion of our campaign.
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