President  Barack Obama has recently traveled the country citing a new statistic: One in five women in this country are victims of rape or attempted rape, according to a report from The White House Council on Women and Girls.

Julie Gelb, Caroline Heres and Jackie Reilly are attempting to raise awareness of that statistic by starting the Girl Code Movement, an anti-sexual assault organization that aims to educate college students on the issue.

“We want the Girl Code Movement to have a big impact,” Heres said. “We want to wake people up.”

The three founders are all Alpha Xi Delta sisters who bonded through their own experiences with sexual assault. In November, they created a movement that would offer support to other victims.

Janet Epstein, the director of The Advocacy Center at SU, said that in 94 percent of campus sexual assaults, the survivor knows the offender.

There are many misconceptions about rape, which often times leads to the blame being placed upon the person victimized, she said.

“It is never the fault of the person who is assaulted,” she said. “Nothing another individual does causes that person to commit sexual assault.”

The Girl Code movement, which was born not only out of hurt, but also out of hope, aims to send this message.

When Jackie Reilly, a sophomore multimedia photography and design major, came back to campus early to work as a peer adviser, she decided to go out with friends to a fraternity house. There, she talked to a man she had met briefly on Facebook.

At the party, Reilly consumed alcohol, but she said she knew her limits and had not lost control.

But that quickly changed after the man offered her another shot. The bottom of the cup was her last memory.

“That one extra shot should not have done what it did,” she said. “I woke up the next morning in bed with him hovering nearby. I did not remember anything.”

The next morning, Reilly said the man never acknowledged what happened the night before. Returning to her dorm, she laid in bed all morning, feeling as if something was off.

“My body felt so heavy, I couldn’t move,” she said. “I have never felt anything like it before — I knew something was wrong.”

Straight away, Reilly told her mother what happened. The next evening, Reilly got examined at Crouse Hospital, but the hospital did not have a drug test that could identify date-rape drugs.

Unlike Reilly, Caroline Heres kept her sexual assault a secret for more than two years.

The sophomore biochemistry major felt guilty that she was a victim, given that her parents had warned her about dangerous relationships her whole life.

Like many sexual assault victims, Heres knew her attacker, a man she had a bad relationship with before college that escalated quickly into a situation she called toxic. He soon began pressuring her to advance sexually and disregarded her objections.

Though the relationship lasted nearly three months, the last straw occurred when Heres realized her virginity was at stake.

“He would tell me that everyone my age was doing this,” she said. “I could see the intent he had in his eyes. I had to physically fight back to break free.”

For Julie Gelb, it was difficult not to blame herself. The sophomore public relations major was raped twice, once on a high school trip to Canada and once while studying abroad last summer in Madrid.

Gelb said it was hard not to blame herself because she was intoxicated both times.

In a recent blog post for The Girl Code Movement, Gelb goes into detail about her experiences and the isolation she felt.

“I have retraced those two nights in my memory trying desperately to find ways that I could have prevented it from happening,” she writes. “It has taken until this point in my life to realize that I will never find justification for those two men’s decisions to have their way with my black-out drunk, unconscious body.”

Gelb, Heres and Reilly have all found that starting the conversation about sexual assault has been therapeutic.

Since launching on campus in November, The Girl Code Movement has amassed thousands of followers between Facebook and Twitter and has received hundreds of messages from girls around the world sharing their own stories.

The Girl Code Movement is ready to take the next step this semester by increasing publicity and holding events.

The Girl Code Movement aims to empower bystanders. The catch phrase for this message is the “Cock Block Crew,” which is a staple hashtag on the group’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

“We know (the hashtag) has some shock value, but the ‘Cock Block Crew’ is meant to motivate people to intervene in situations that happen all the time on campus,” Heres said.

Too many girls are left alone at parties or even on streets like Euclid Avenue where they are even more at-risk, she said, where students often wrongfully assume that they’re with their boyfriends.

“People also assume the best, never the worst. Others simply feel awkward intervening on behalf of a girl they may not know,” Heres said. “But who cares if it’s awkward? You would rather intervene than have someone wake up in tears.”

The group recognizes that sexual assault can affect anyone, so they want to start the conversation about the issue to make the campus a safer place.

Said Reilly: “I think when you can put a face on sexual assault — you make it real. We don’t consider starting the Girl Code Movement brave, we consider it necessary.”

 

Published on February 3, 2014 at 10:39 pm

Contact Jen: jbundy@syr.edu