Alec Massey
Features Editor
Rock band concerts, candlelight vigils, and witch hats may seem to not fit together, but they all played a role in the origins of the national program, Take Back the Night. Though the foundation for the program was created in the 2001 by Katie Koestner, Take Back the Night can be traced all the way back to the 1970s and has been upheld by mainly women and college students throughout the decades. Sewanee itself has a history with Take Back the Night, and Dr. Sylvia Gray, in conjunction with the students of Sewanee and deputy coordinator Kaylei Goodine, helped to make Take Back the Night an annual event on campus.
After arriving on campus in late 2017, Gray noticed that many programs towards sexual assault prevention were led by students. “They are trying to make Sewanee a better place, but they have finals; they have exams; they are trying to study abroad…,” she said in reference to the students’ roles as leaders in prevention programming. For her first year of work, she collaborated with students in order to figure out what programs they wanted, and during her second year, they asked the students which programs they could take on to lessen their workload. “There is a gap of support and backing to the student organizations so that it is [not] sustainable,” she said.
There are several national programs for sexual assault awareness and prevention such as a T-shirt program, a denim clothing program, and a red flag program. Gray chose Take Back the Night (TBTN) as a jumping-off point because of its history at Sewanee. In 2001, Sewanee first tried out the program, but it quickly fell off. Around 2012, women and gender studies students arranged the program, and they walked from a theme house, Greek house, or any favored location on campus to Guerry-Garth where a Q&A was held for survivors, allies, and supporters to come together and share their stories. However, it was discontinued again. “Is there anyone we need to be in contact with? Is there a reason why it stopped? Is there some offense to it?” were all questions that Gray asked while trying to revamp the program. After her search for answers came up short, Gray and Goodine started the program again, and it has been going on strong for three years. “I was very impressed that students were leading things and that Sewanee was a place where students could create an organization and take it on,” she said, but Gray also recognized that support was needed and fulfilled her promise to work with and for the students on prevention and educational programs.
Sewanee’s history with TBTN is relatively brief when looking at the movement’s history. Back in the 1970s, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles women fell victim to violence from men, and to gain support and resources for them, women from the University of Southern Florida marched through campus wearing witches’ brooms and black capes. Throughout the decade more protests took place in relation to sexual violence against women such as violent pornography films and the murder of microbiologist Susan Alexander Speeth. In 1976, a council of women from more than forty countries met in Belgium to advocate for the safety of women on the street. In the 80s, TBTN gained its name from Laura Lederer’s book titled Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography which analyzed gendered violence at the time. Colleges then began to hold TBTN marches. The 90s brought in girl rock band concerts, clanging pots and pans, candlelight vigils, and chapel speak-outs to the TBTN scene, and real change started to happen in policies, laws, and handbooks to cement victims’ rights and to standardize the definition of consent. As previously mentioned, in 2001 the TBTN Foundation was created by Katie Koestner who was the first woman to speak out about her experience with “date-rape” drugs, and her foundation extended its support to non-women survivors and started to educate corporations and professional sports teams on sexual assault and gendered violence.
College students have consistently been a part of the program’s rise to popularity, and Gray and her team have helped Sewanee to continue the legacy that the women in the 70s started to help prevent gendered violence and protect survivors.For more information on Dr. Sylvia Gray, see an early article of The Sewanee Purple titled “New Title IX Coordinator Increases Communication with Students,” and for a deeper dive into Sewanee’s Title IX policy see “Sewanee Under New Title IX Policy.”