Creating a Club to Increase Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention on ECU's Campus

Sexual assault is a problem that has an unprecedently high occurrence on college campuses. It was found that 14.8% of students will experience some form of sexual assault while in college (Cantor et al., 2015). However, it can feel like little is done to prevent it. We saw the need for something to be done about the prevalence of sexual assault on ECU’s campus, and we decided the best solution for this was to create an on-campus organization. Our main goal for this organization is to raise sexual assault awareness by presenting the hard statistics and facts to the students of ECU in a familiar, on campus setting. Our hope was that with more awareness of the problem, the more it would be prevented. With this aim in mind, we also wanted to have speakers and figures on campus share their stories and perspectives to help personalize a subject that is often hard to talk about. At the start of this year we created the organization “A Better World” in order to begin this important conversation. In trying to go about this process we ran into many challenges, with barriers both outside and inside of our group. These included challenges with the ECU officiation, keeping campus resources with the high turnover rate in many departments, and trying to gauge student interest with the material we presented and the club itself. Despite this, we are pushing forward. We had our first interest meeting on Thursday, February 21st, 2019. At that meeting, we began collecting data on how our presence as a club influences their awareness of sexual assault. We did that by giving students a survey on both their happiness with the club and the effect of the club on their knowledge on sexual assault and its prevention