Posted: April 21, 2008
College Newspaper: Spectator

The third annual “Take Back the Night” event will take place tonight at 8 p.m. on the front lawn, to raise awareness against sexual and domestic violence.

The “Take Back the Night” committee has already been passed out whistles and information packets to students throughout the month of April about the event. T-shirts and bottles of water will be passed out today around campus.

“It’s been my passion to make sure that we educate not only students but faculty and staff,” Leah McMillan, licensed marriage and family therapist for the VSU Counseling Center, said. “A lot of times, unfortunately on university campuses, it takes a murder, a homicide, for people to really pay attention when the fact is that rape is one of the most common crimes on campuses.”

According to McMillan, chair of the Sexual Assault Committee, the most common type of rapes or sexual assaults are with dates, acquaintances or strangers, but acquaintances is the most common.

“It’s a student that’s been in your class, that you don’t know very well. It’s someone that’s your lab partner,”
McMillan said. “It’s someone that lives in your apartment complex that sees you walk back and forth.”

With April being National Sexual Assault Month, McMillan and others around campus are trying to help students, faculty and staff learn how to protect themselves.

“We’re also trying to dispel myths that girls who get raped are always drunk, always wear the short mini-skirts, always walking alone at night,” McMillan, who is also a member of the Lowndes County Sexual Assault Response Team (SART), said. “The fact is that anyone can be raped at any time, day or night, any location, regardless of what they’re wearing, their gender, race or weight. There’s not a stereotypical profile of someone that could be assaulted.”

That means that males too can be sexually assaulted. Unlike women, in Georgia men cannot be legally raped. Instead, it’s classified as sexual assault. To be legally raped, there has to be a female sex organ penetrated by a male sex organ while sexual assault is labeled as “everything else.”

“Males have a difficult time reporting,” McMillan said. “They believe that they will not be believed and a lot of
them don’t know that resources are available to them.”

Rape kits are also available to men.

“The investigation is going to run exactly the same regardless of the victim. You would get the forensic evidence that happened differently biologically, but there’s still going to be something,” she said.

The VSU Counseling Center not only works with students who have been recently sexually assaulted
or raped. They help students, staff and faculty who are still dealing with past issues that have happened to them.

According to McMillan, males are more open to talk about sexual abuse from their childhood than they are with something that has happened recently.

“A lot of time, it takes a while for victims to be willing to talk. Some victims, it takes a short period of time and for some, it takes a lifetime,” McMillan said. “The fact is that sexual assault and rape is a trauma. I compare it to 9/11. We will never be the same. We have been forever changed.”