By MARTY LEVINE
Last fall, Archisha Ghosh began leading groups of students gathered in the Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (OEDI) through perhaps their first frank talk about healthy relationships and how to avoid sexual assault. Ghosh is a prevention educator, and the program is called Circle Up — one of many new efforts funded by a $500,000 Pitt Seed grant for new sexual misconduct prevention and survivor support.
Many of the students are facing the “red zone,” Ghosh said. “Your first semester of your freshman year. You participate in drinking culture. You don’t know enough” to handle it properly, especially meeting new people who may not understand what “consent” entails.
“It was a common experience for everyone not to have sex education — and they had to teach themselves,” Ghosh said of current students’ experience growing up. “My generation” — she is 23 and a graduate student in the School of Public Health — “had free access to the Internet and that’s where most people lived” and learned how relationships and sex supposedly worked.
She asked a recent Circle Up group, “When did you first start thinking about your academic career?” That happened in elementary school, most told her. Then she asked, “When did you get space to think about who you wanted to be in a relationship, or as a sexual being?
“Those people were, like, ‘Never,’” Ghosh said. But after Circle Up sessions, they understand that others are facing the same unfamiliar issues. Hearing other students talk, and how they handled similar situations, gives them tools to handle their own lives, she said.
This Pitt Seed Grant program is led by Carrie Benson, senior manager for prevention and education in OEDI, and Lynissa Stokes, a research assistant in the School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, who has done research on the experiences of Black undergraduate women — an underserved population. The program cites a 2019 Association of American Universities (AAU) survey showing the need for new educational programs, awareness-building campaigns and prevention research.
Stokes, a clinical psychologist, said that, in her work with older adults, she has seen sexual-related trauma still affecting people decades after it happened. Young people who experience sexual misconduct tend not to report it, the AAU survey showed: They think it’s somehow not a real issue because “It’s not serious enough” or “I wasn’t physically hurt” or “Whatever happened started out consensually,” Stokes said.
Benson, for her part, “started receiving a lot of disclosures” from students in her work. “Hearing stories and working with these younger people, it felt like we’ve got to do more,” she said. Even though there are already some prevention and counseling programs, “there’s just not enough out there, compared to the scope of the problem.”
“There isn’t a common language around consent, around agency,” she added, or even a realization “that your partner has some agency and you have to understand that.”
While TV and movie dramas may show strangers perpetrating sexual assault, “those are the most rare forms of violence,” she noted. Ninety percent of sexual misconduct reports to the University involve current or former intimate partners of the victims, she said. If students have more tools to handle relationships, they may see less violence: “We wanted to go a little deeper here ... a program that allowed for dialogue, that happened more than once.”
The seed grant has already funded many Circle Up sessions with members of campus student organizations and those in Pitt’s first-year program. “They feel much more comfortable using both community and university resources” after participating in Circle Up, Benson said, based on surveys from before and after the program, “which is really exciting, because sexual violence experience is very isolating.”
“Students report that they are much more comfortable in expressing their needs in relationships,” Benson also reported. “Students leave Circles feeling empowered to end sexual violence, that is huge. ... It’s kind of beautiful.”
Circle Up is only one new development under the seed grant, Benson said. The grant has allowed new weekly visits from representatives of Pittsburgh Action Against Rape, who are available to talk to students dropping in. The new program also offers small grants to support new student-conceived initiatives, such as an art exhibit in the Frick Fine Arts building about survival of sexual assault.
The seed grant team has been able to partner with SETpoint, which teaches self-defense, both verbally and physically, to student groups. In the second year of the grant, the team plans to offer small grants to prevention researchers at Pitt “to help them get to the next level,” Benson said, such as testing community interventions based on findings of their previous research.
The seed funding also has been used to hire additional students in prevention program support roles, such as aiding with OEDI events and offering more student perspectives on OEDI work.
It’s important that the grant allow OEDI to expand existing programs, Stokes said. The effect of sexual assault on the lives of those victims in college reverberates far beyond the event, she said. “It affects the schoolwork they’re able to do and their ability to be on campus.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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