Music education freshmen Melody MacLachlan and her friends from PRIDE — the West Circle LGBT support group — joined Students for Choice on Tuesday night to assemble signs to be used in a march across campus Saturday.
The march is the second protest held by the Students for Choice in support of the One Billion Rising Campaign to end violence against women.
According the One Billion Rising website, one in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime.
Participants will meet at the rock on Farm Lane at noon Saturday to participate in the protest, and are encouraged to wear pink or red. Protesters are expected to leave the rock using Farm Lane, and turn left on Grand River Avenue. The march is expected to end at the Brody neighborhood complex in front of The Kellogg Center, premed sophomore and co-president of SFC Cayley Winters said.
Public relations representative for Students for Choice and public policy junior Emma Walter said the group invited everyone to the event with the same beliefs. Walter expects many organizations such as Sexual Assault Crisis Intervention, Students for Human Trafficking, the LGBTQ fraternity Delta Lambda Phi, PRIDE, the Health Care Council and Break the Shackles to attend the march.
Prenursing sophomore and co-president of Students for Choice Alicia Geniac believes the march will bring closure and safety to victims, allowing them to feel they’re not alone.
“Just talking about things and creating a conversation,” Geniac said. “I think conversations are important in a lot of things and stuff that we don’t talk about, if we start talking about it, it becomes more realistic and real and people are more aware.”
Geniac said she is a strong believer that starting a conversation allows all parties to become more involved.
“The more they learn, the more you learn about yourself and other people and how to better formulate your actions and help decrease the number of violence and things that can be taken as invasive abuse,” Geniac said. “Our group tries to cover a lot of areas from sexual assault, to women’s rights and promoting voting, trying to cover a large range of things that are just connected and trying to start conversations about all these things and how they’re interconnected.”
Other students believe the march will help normalize and promote the idea that rape culture isn’t going to be tolerated any longer.
“It is very unlikely that you will encounter any woman who has never been domestically or sexually assaulted at some point in her life,” Winters said. “If that makes you feel something, whether angry, sad, or wanting to simply make some awareness to it, please come march with us.”
