Student Activities and the Office of Student Health and Support are working together to foster awareness of sexual assault across campus throughout April with student-produced creative films, poems and galleries.

Kristen Bauer, the college’s Title IX deputy coordinator and health educator within SHS and a member of the Sexual Assault Awareness Education Committee, said in an April 7 emailed statement that the committee formed three years ago to educate students about sexual assault.

“SAAEC plans to continue these efforts in the future because the events have been such a success,” Bauer said.

Celina Falcon, a senior advertising major and marketing assistant for Student Activities, said Student Activities worked with SHS and SAAEC to bring attention to the issue and spoke to classes to encourage students to attend the events. 

“There is a way to help [survivors] get through what [they] went through with creative arts healing,” Falcon said. “We do not want to have people feel ostracized because something happened to them that they did not deserve.”

Josh Corson, a junior creative writing major and president of Columbia’s Point Blank Poetry club, said the club has been working with SHS to organize events for the initiative.

“Problems like this need to be addressed,” Corson said. “We have built a community that is supposed to be a safe environment for all of us to grow not only in our craft but [in] who we are as people.”