YSU Take Back the Night event today focused on sexual violence

YOUNGSTOWN

“Yes means yes! No means no! Whatever we wear! Wherever we go!” students, staff and community members chanted today during Youngstown State University’s Take Back the Night sexual violence awareness event.

YSU sociology student Gwen Mayberry said the message is easy to understand.

“Take Back the Night is representing sexual violence women often experience when wandering throughout the night, and them taking back their right to safety in doing so,” she said.

Cryshanna Jackson-Leftwich, director of YSU's department of politics and international studies and women and gender studies, said the goal of Take Back the Night is to get the word out about sexual assault and to “see how we can make a difference.”

“We are letting the community become aware of how we are affected by sexual assaults,” Dawn Powell, Youngstown’s Rape Crisis and Counseling Center program director said.

According to the center's website – statistics courtesy of Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network – every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted and one out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.

Victims of sexual assault do not exclude men, however.

“One out of every 33 American men has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in his lifetime,” the website says. “

Among all the victims, about nine out of 10 are female.”

College campuses are even more of a common place for sexual assaults, Powell added.

Read more about the matter and today's event in Friday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.