Content Warning: This story discusses sexual assault.
For sophomore psychology major Yi-Ann Li, sex was something that was never talked about in the home.
“I feel like within a lot of like non-European cultures, you don’t really talk about sex, and it’s like, I never even got the sex talk from my parents,” Li said. “And even when I was assaulted at 15, [the talk] never happened.”
This helped fuel Li to co-found a new club on campus, Survivor Support Community (SSC), focused on creating “a community for healing where survivors and allies are safe, heard, supported and not alone,” according to the club’s mission statement.
One in three women at USC experience sexual assault, according to a 2019 report. Li is one of those women, and wanted to create a space to support survivors, like herself.
USC sophomore pre-law student and SSC co-founder Sammie Sorsby-Jones, also a sexual assualt survivor, wanted a space dedicated to survivors at USC as she could not find one beforehand.
“Our culture at USC prized ‘normalcy’ and its rampant sexual violence over the safety of their fellow (predominantly women-identified) students,” Sorsby-Jones wrote in the club’s launch statement. “I have found being a survivor at USC to be incredibly isolating, especially before our campus reckoning in October. But as I felt completely alone, I knew that I wasn’t.”
The club’s Instagram page gained more than 100 followers on the day of their launch, Jan. 20.
Meetings will generally be social and focused on discussions of healing, trauma and education as well as simply providing a space for survivors to feel at home, according to the club’s general member form.
Natalia Parraz, president of USC’s intersectional feminist organization USC FLOW, shared her support of this new community and its necessity in an interview with Annenberg Media, saying “without having these conversations, we kind of see it leads to a culture that tends to accept sexual assault.”
“[Sammie and Yi-Ann] have the drive and the motivation to tackle a very heavy topic,” Parraz said. “They’ve done the hardest part, basically starting this and having the mindset to see it through.”
In addition to the club providing a much-needed space on campus for survivors and allies, Sorsby-Jones and Li stress a second purpose of their club as a tool to educate friends and family of survivors who don’t know how to handle conversations regarding sexual assualt.
“It’s just like a lack of education and lack of awareness about the extent to which this issue is real and lived and how pervasive it is at USC,” Sorsby-Jones said. “[Sexual assault] is not something to be taken lightly. And it’s time that as a student body [we] come together and try to flip the narrative.”
As SSC grows, there may be additional opportunities for advocacy work, as stated in the club’s general member form. The club is awaiting official approval from USC, but the founders are eager for applicants to apply to join their e-board.
If you are interested in participating as a general member, the general member sign-up form can be found here.