SUNY Oneonta students played a game and learned about sexual assault between classes on the campus quad Thursday, April 27.
“April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month,” SUNY Oneonta Health Educator Rebecca Harrington said, and said her department hosts an educational event about sexual assault every year during the last week in April.
This year, Harrington and her department created a board game based on Candy Land that informs students about different forms of interpersonal violence and how it affects different communities. According to the rules, each letter on the game board designated a different community, and each color on the board designated a different topic area. Topics discussed were harassment, consent, stalking, coercion, tension building and interpersonal violence.
The game board was spread out along a portion of the quad for students to play. Students scanned a QR code that took them to the game app and read about different facts pertaining to sexual violence as they moved along the board. Around the board, there were four different game stations that corresponded with the topics they learned in the game.
Each student who completed the game and the different game stations received Leadership Education and Development credit, Harrington said. Students earn LEAD credits outside the classroom at event attendance.
She said the goal of the event was to have students learn about the different topics so they could intervene if they see something happening to someone.
Students who had limited time could choose to play the games around the board. One such student was senior Victor Amanze. The games taught about harassment, coercion, stalking, intersections/pyramid of hate, consent, two relationship violence games — one was the power and control wheel, the other was the cycle of violence, Harrington said.
Freshman Sary Barrios said she learned about stalking and learned lesbian women and gay men are stalked more often than heterosexual women and men.
Sophomore Jhesenia Ayora said she learned it’s hard to know how many women are abused in the country because many don’t report the abuse. “Women feel powerless and manipulated so many don’t report their attack,” she said. “It’s a big issue.”
Fellow sophomore Elizabeth Larli said she learned about all of the support for victims that is available on campus.
One of the supports available is Violence Intervention Services. Jess Eklund, campus advisor for the program, was helping out by manning a game table focused on interpersonal violence. One game showed how a relationship can turn from the honeymoon stage, to warning signs the relationship might not be healthy, to a violent relationship. The other game had statements written on magnets and students had to put them on words that coincided with the facet of the unhealthy relationship.
Eklund said by the time students graduate college they are either a victim of violence or they know someone who was a victim.
Around campus, 500 people wore T-shirts that said “Know Violence” on the front and on the back had information about sexual assault that coordinated with the colors on the game, Harrington said.