Campus women are inviting faculty, staff, students and the community to "take back the night" next week during Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

From morning until night, Tuesday, April 5, events are planned to dispel myths and provide information to help prevent sexual assault during a presentation by staff members of Genesis House, our local domestic violence shelter, and a rally organized by students called "Take Back the Night."

“With April being Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we wanted to give attention to the fact that most rapes are committed by someone the person knows — not a stranger,” says Gretta Stanger, director of the Women's Center and chairperson of Sociology and Political Science.

"Take Back the Night" keynote speaker Alison Piepmeier

The day begins with the opening of the Clothesline Project, a display of T-shirts created by local women who’ve been affected by violence. Patterned after the National Clothesline Project, the display will be on exhibit from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Tech Pride Room.

The exhibit serves as the backdrop for a donation drive to benefit the Wilma Carr Memorial Scholarship, which is named for a local domestic violence victim who died in 1997 and is given annually to a TTU student who has been the victim of spousal or child abuse.

“Unfortunately," says Stanger, "there are more deserving applicants than the $10,000 endowment allows the scholarship to support each year, so we are hoping to increase the endowment with donations."

At 11 a.m. in the Tech Pride Room, a talk titled “When Your Date Goes Bad” will be presented by Director Janell Clark and other representatives of Genesis House and its sexual assault response center.

The Women’s Center joins with the Tech Ladies Coalition, a relatively new student group on campus, and the Commission on the Status of Women to present the day’s final event, the “Take Back the Night” rally, march and candlelight vigil.

A worldwide community action initiative to end domestic and sexual violence and abuse, “Take Back the Night” provides an organized platform for communities to proclaim their refusal to tolerate continued violence and abuse.

TTU alumnus Alison Piepmeier, associate director of Vanderbilt University’s Women’s Studies Program, will be the event’s keynote speaker. Piepmeier is the author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press, 2003).

At Vanderbilt, she teaches courses on feminism, gender and violence, as well as a service-learning class called "Sexual Stories" in conjunction with Nashville's Magdalene Project, a residential recovery program for women with a criminal history of prostitution and drug addiction.

Piepmeier's talk kicks off the "Take Back the Night" rally at 7:30 p.m. on the front steps of the RUC.

For more information about the April 5 events or donating to the Wilma Carr Memorial Scholarship, call the Women’s Center at 3850 or visit its web site at www.tntech.edu/women/.