On Nov. 17 the fraternity released a video similar to the White House campaign It’s On Us to end sexual violence on college campuses.
Fraternity brothers and members of Chi Omega and Delta Phi Epsilon sororities were featured in the minute and a half video reading off sexual assault statistics.
Pikes recruited help from sorority women and faculty as well as national support to further their efforts.
“We can’t just let it be a women’s issue because that’s not solving such a large part of the problem,” Pikes Health and Safety Chair Patrick O’Malley said. “That doesn’t help us stop men from ?sexually assaulting women. By putting it all on women, then it’s them trying to avoid it and not really having guys take a positive role in the prevention of it.”
The video was then followed by a social media campaign headed by Pikes President Bill Phan. On Nov. 20, the fraternity chapter’s Twitter @IU_Pikes tweeted a sexual assault statistic every thirty minutes with the hashtag #ShattertheSilence.
“The majority of sexual assaults on campus are from greek life,” Phan said. “Obviously since we’re a greek fraternity, we need to make sure our guys are educated, so they know what is the line and what isn’t the line.”
After three days, the video had more than 2,000 views on Youtube. As of Sunday, the Shatter the Silence hashtag has been tweeted 202 times in the last 10 days, according to Twitter analytic website Topsy.
“I think this is the best way to do it,” Theta Phi Alpha member Lauren Devereux said. “When everybody is on board and working together to say, ‘We’re going to shatter the silence, we’re going to talk about this,’ that’s when things are going to start changing.”
According to oneinfour.org , fraternity men are three times more likely to commit sexual assault than other college men, based off of two different longitudinal studies. These types of statistics create a negative stigma and reputation for the community as a whole, Phan said.
“That’s kind of embarrassing, not just for them (those involved) but for the entire greek community,” Phan said. “Obviously when you’re in the greek community, people typically have the negatives, not the positives, so that kind of hurts all of us.”
In addition to IU’s campus-wide sexual assault survey sent out by Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel and Dean of Students Harold Goldsmith, IFC and Panhellenic Association forwarded chapters information to take the ?national It’s On Us pledge against sexual assault.
The video and social campaign were the first steps in a three-step process, Phan said. First, the fraternity aimed to educate the community through its video, then generate conversation through its social presence. The final step will be ongoing prevention, Phan said.
For national sexual assault awareness month in April , Pikes plan to work with sorority women to hand out teal ribbons to keep the conversation going.
“We are using this month to make a big step forward, but we’re not just going to end it at the end of the month,” O’Malley said. “I want to make sure we, as a chapter, stress that it’s a 24/7, 365 days kind of issue, and it’s not just for one month out of the year.”
