Here is a guest post, featuring a reflection paper that U of L student Jeremy Stochaj wrote about Take Back the Night for one of his classes. Thanks Jeremy!

            “Take Back the Night”, a title for an eventful evening as powerful as the night itself.  I was training with Housing and Residence Life the summer prior to my sophomore year when a PEACC representative came into one of our day-long training sessions to introduce us to PEACC and the event.  It was the first time I’d encountered organized domestic and sexual violence awareness and prevention in a community.  This hit home with me.

            With twenty-eight freshman students below me and my job being to “guide” them, I thought no campus supported event would be better to bring them to than this.  So I put up fliers at the start of the semester; I spread awareness about PEACC and what positive male influences could do for the program; and encouraged each of the students to come.  It was a first-time experience for all of us and I was glad to be sharing it with them and spreading education about the dangers of domestic and sexual abuse.

            When we arrived, perhaps one of the most powerful public speakers I have witnessed was entrancing the crowd atop a podium.  A woman and victim of sexual abuse, we rose and fell with the rhythm of her words.  It was not necessarily that her dialect or emotion carried the crowd insomuch as it was the topic of her speech and the way it touched each of us.

            When it was time for the march I didn’t really know how it would be organized, or exactly how it would occur.  But before I had time to think about it we were moving together as a crowd.  We shouted empowering words.  We felt powerful.  We were.

            Was it that we were yelling directly at anyone?  No.  Quite contrary, actually, was that we were yelling for someone, for everyone, for every woman, child, or even man ever affected negatively by sexual or domestic violence.  The strength of numbers was evident.  We were truly taking back the night.

            The message conveyed through the event was clear, that together, through education and awareness and the mindset that we were more powerful than any one sick human being who made prey of women, we could make a difference.

            I returned the next year and went through the march again.  Not by obligation or as part of a job; but because I wanted to be there.  I think that community support is incredibly critical in providing a message to abused women everywhere that you don’t have to be a victim.  And that if you are, you are not alone, that the peers surrounding you are a support network and are willing to help.

            The night effectively taught me that this is no longer a problem that we as a society are willing to quietly allow further.  It is a mind-blowing sense of togetherness and power that events such as this create that give it its magnitude.

            “We aren’t willing to be victims.” “We don’t have to feel any sort of shame or embarrassment, our attackers should feel fear.”  I was raised by a mother who was a victim of violent domestic abuse, and I think to myself, ‘If she had such a powerful community of support surrounding her, maybe if she had felt the power that we all felt those nights.. just maybe.. it could have saved her from one more night of pain, one more night of grief.’  But I take solace in knowing that just maybe, one less woman will.