Archive for September, 2009

Co-Director, Kathy Hodges, with Ashley Fagert, Kaitlyn Williams, Megan Darden and Anna DiFiore

Members of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority from UNC Chapel Hill dropped off their Build-A-Bear creations for FVRC kids. The group made 20 bears, including a mermaid and Spiderman bear, and wonderful cookies for our shelter residents and staff.

This is the first test post.

When I joined the FVRC team on January 26, 2009 I was given one small task: stop sexual violence in Chatham County.

To get a handle on my task, I decided to take a look at some numbers:

• 81% of middle and high school students have suffered sexual harassment during their time in school,
• 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime,
• 1 in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime,
• and, 1 in 11 teens report being victims of dating violence.

Whoa. Not that small of a task, I guess. So, I could tell I was going to have to get a couple more people on my team. I’m not the first to come up with this idea. Actually, a lot of people are doing this; it’s something called Primary Prevention.

Primary prevention means that we try to get everyone to work to stop sexual violence. Makes sense, right? I mean, how could I stop sexual violence all by myself? But, if I get a whole lot of people to care and start working toward ending sexual violence, we’ve got a pretty good shot.

And, primary prevention means working to change the things about our culture that cause, support, or allow sexual violence. So, it’s not about being some cloaked, super-hero, crime-fighter, but more about challenging some of the bad things in our culture that contribute to sexual violence.

That’s what this blog is going to be about. It’ll be about all the things out there we need to challenge, why we need to challenge them, some ideas on how to challenge them, and maybe just some fun rambling.

Stay tuned!
Rob

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