p>Over 20 volunteers and staff from the Everywoman’s Center and from Safe Passage, a battered woman’s shelter in Northampton, spent the morning distributing daisies and information concerning issues of stalking and violence against women yesterday.
The “Loves Me Not” anti-stalking campaign continued the work of
the Everywoman’s Center and Safe Passage in their efforts to raise awareness of stalking, its prevalence, and what resources are available to victims and survivors of stalking.
Volunteers and staff handed out daisies and information in the University of Massachusetts campus center, in Northampton and at Smith College. The event took place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Safe Passage offers counseling and transitional housing for battered women. The center also offers assistance with finding permanent housing and work, parenting support and education, and a 24 hour hotline.
A legal referral program also assists victims of domestic
violence in locating an attorney. The center recently celebrated its
25th year of creating solutions and support for battered women.
The Everywoman’s Center is a campus-based women’s center that
provides leadership in promoting educational access and equity for
women. The center’s mission is to empower women to take full control of their lives and strengthen the connections among women. The Center sponsors five different programs and two projects designed to serve the needs of the UMass and surrounding community.
Another campaign sponsored by the Everywoman’s Center is the
“Got Consent?” poster campaign, designed to raise awareness of sexual
assault.
Volunteers and staff working on the “Loves Me Not” campaign
felt that the information being distributed, as well as the flowers, helped
to raise awareness of an issue that otherwise receives little attention.
“We wanted to do this campaign because people really don’t
know much about stalking. We wanted to bring it to the forefront, talk about
it explicitly,” said Nicole Manganelli, a project coordinator in the
Everywoman’s Center’s Education Advocate Program. “We also thought with Valentine’s Day coming up it would be a good time to catch people, to
get them thinking
According to a study by the United States Department of
Justice, each year an estimated 1,006,970 women and 370,992 men are stalked in the U.S.
Sixty percent of female victims and 30 percent of male victims
are stalked by an intimate partner. According to the study, one in
12 women and one in 45 men will be stalked in their lifetime.
“We know people know about stalking but often people don’t really get it. Many people think that it only effects celebrities,” said Ben Ostiguy,
a campus educator from the Everywoman’s Center. “We think that the
flowers will give people a chance to stop and think that stalking really does
happen, even on college campuses.”
Many students found the campaign informative, and some found
it comforting.
“I thought my ex-boyfriend was just going through a phase
after our breakup, but then he began to call my house excessively. I realized
it was getting too much when I went out driving with him and he swerved
the car on purpose,” Lindsay Pemberton, junior nursing and pre-med major, said. “Before it happened I thought stalking just happened in books and
movies. When it happened to me I felt alone. Seeing anti-stalking issues being raised is now comforting.”
The “Loves Me Not” project was funded by a grant awarded by
the United States Department of Justice. The “Grant to Combat Violent
Crimes Against Women on Campus” was awarded to the Everywoman’s Center and to Safe Passage in October of 2002.
The Everywoman’s Center and Safe Passage have also collaborated with libraries and bookstores in Amherst and Northampton. The UMass Textbook Annex, the W.E.B. Dubois Library, Food for Thought Books, Atticus Albion Bookshop, Jeffery Amherst Bookshop and Beyond Words Bookshop will all be distributing bookmarks with information about stalking during the month of February.
The title of the campaign, “Loves me Not” was derived from
the “Love Me Not” campaign originally created by the Los Angeles County
District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Commission Against Assaults on Women (LACAAW).
For more information or to get involved with the Everywoman’s
center, visit the website at www.umass.edu/ewc/ea or contact the center
at 545-0883. To receive more information on Safe Passage, visit
www.safepass.org.
