One in four college women and one in 75 college men are sexually assaulted during their time on American college campuses.
This is a scary statistic, but campuses all around America are beginning to take a stand. University of Florida has created a peer educated group through Gator Well called STRIVE (Sexual Trauma Interpersonal Violence Education) to help create a campus free of interpersonal violence.
UF has had a group on campus like STRIVE since the ‘70s. It started out being called Care and has switched through many names until it finally ended up with the current name.
Rita Lawrence, Interpersonal Violence Convention Coordinator through Gator Well, is the staff director of STRIVE.
“I have some helpers. They’re my peer educators, and they make up the group, the student organization STRIVE,” Lawrence commented.
STRIVE is currently made up of eight undergraduate students and four graduate students who work together to help educate UF students and staff on sexual violence.
The group focuses on teaching students how to recognize the signs of sexual violence and help prevent this violence from happening to themselves and their peers.
In honor of October being domestic violence awareness month, STRIVE will be tabling at different events all around campus. This includes events STRIVE is creating on its own such as the Tie Dye event on October 22nd, at Plaza of the Americas. It also involves events STRIVE is invited to table at, like the ESG (national professional health education honorary) event on Wednesday, October 21st to educate on intimate partner violence.
“We try to do education with all of our tabling events, so it’s a little bit different than other places,” Lawrence said. “You usually have to answer some trivia questions or play some games or something that have an education component to them.”
STRIVE is out on campus usually once a week, especially in the beginning of the school year, since statistically that is more of a violent time, especially for new students.
Along with the tabling STRIVE does, the group also puts on annual events such as their Cupid Consent Week in February or the Take Back the Night Walk in April.
“We’re planning on tabling SwampCon,” said a STRIVE lead peer educator Kelli Selwyn. “Since there’s a lot of cosplay going on at conventions, we’re going to have a cosplay as not consent table.”
SwampCon is a convention at the Reitz Union on Valentines weekend that surrounds a lot of different genres such as anime, and other pop culture topics.
A big focus of STRIVE is how society is shaping men and how this is causing large amounts of violence on campus.
“You can’t change the culture if less than 50 percent of the culture’s involved in trying to change it,” Lawrence said.
“I feel like it’s a good program because it’s very informative. Especially with stuff that’s been happening like Treon Harris and other athletes and just regular people, it would be nice if people go educated on that kind of thing,” remarked University of Florida student Kyle Cummins.
Last year, IFC (Interfraternity Council) encouraged all their fraternity’s to do consent presentations and this year they’re doing sexual violence bystander prevention through STRIVE to help reach men on campus and get them involved
STRIVE also helped work with Think About It, the course that new students have to take before registering for classes, by giving feedback on the course. This is so the course coincides with what STRIVE is educating students on and what is being taught in the online course.
All in all, STRIVE's main focus is to reduce instances of violence on campus.
“To really inspire and educate students and to empower them to help create a culture that is violence free,” Lawrence commented.
For more information on STRIVE and the work they do or for event information, visit gatorwell.ufsa.ufl.edu/programs/strive
