Today Care-SC, the Confidential Advocacy, Resources, and Education Support Center, hosted Care-fest in Founders Park. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, so the event was centered around teaching students how to intervene when something happens in order to create a safe environment for everyone.
Deborah Schleicher, the Director of Care-SC, spoke to the importance of having this event on a college campus.
“I think it’s really important to have visibility on this issue, right?” Schliecher said. “We know that many students are survivors and sometimes survivorhood can feel very isolating or you might feel like you’re alone or you can’t necessarily connect with other survivors. So this is a day in which we want to bring awareness and let...the survivor community know, that Care-SC is here to support them and we’ll always have their back.”
The event was also centered around students making CARE-kits. Derek Wu, a violence prevention specialist at Care-SC, discussed the CARE-kit activity that students participated in. Each kit item is represented on a table that has a notebook, a snack, a bag charm, and a facemask.
“Each of the tables that we have correlate to a different type of intervention method,” Wu said. “We like to teach the four Ds: direct, distract, delegate, and debrief. At each of the tables, you’re going to get an item that correlates with the intervention method.”
Wu describes that the direct table has a notebook and shared the importance of the notebook.
“So you can write down different things that you may feel like you want to say,” Wu said.
At the distract table, students learned how to divert away from the harmful behavior.
“where you will get a snack... And so usually when it comes to using a distraction method,” Wu said. “It does take a little bit of creativity. So you can do something like grab a snack, make loud noises in class.”
At the delegate table, there was a bag charm with resources on it.
“And we also have some advocates on that tables as well that you can talk to,” Wu said. “You can delegate to anyone on campus as well as people around you.”
At the debrief table, there was a relaxing face mask.
“We understand that it may not necessarily be possible to directly intervene at the very moment... but we can still do something,” Wu said. “we can still debrief with the person who is affected. And in that table, we have...a sheet mask so you can do some self care.”
Promoting campus safety is one of the main goals of the event.
“I think when people think about, you know, what role they play, they may not think that they can help keep other people safe,” Schleicher said. “But what we’re talking about today, which is areas in which you can be a pro-social upstander, ways that you can intervene when something harmful might be happening, even to someone you don’t know...We want you to be equipped with ways that you can respond, reach out, and help in that moment, or even get other people to assist you in helping that person.”
For some students, participating in this event helped them learn about prevention in their community. George Zhou, a sophomore at USC, knew of Care-SC because they create modules that students are required to do.
“I think it’s important because this probably attracted more people than I’d say the online course did,” Zhou said. “There’s courses that are like mandatory, but a lot of people just skim through those. Other activities I feel like don’t make it as important or willing for others to come in and participate. So I think this kind of thing is more fun and easier access and that kind of stuff.”
If you missed the chance to go, you can always connect with Care-SC to learn about how to make the Trojan community a safer space for everyone.