End sexual assaults on college campuses - Video

Nearly 1 in 5 college women experienced a sexual assault or attempted sexual assault since starting college.

Yale University graduate Alexandra Brodsky and S. Daniel Carter, a college and university campus safety advocate are interviewed by MSNBC’s Craig Melvin in this video about how sexual violence can be ended on college campuses.

There are currently 28 schools under scrutiny for sexual violence, and the list includes Dartmouth, University of North Carolina, Princeton, and Harvard Law. S. Daniel Carter said that the issue of sexual violence is a widespread issue.

Brodsky said the real problem is that schools are viewing sexual violence as a PR problem, instead of an issue of public safety and sexism. “They don’t really have the interest of the survivor at heart, they have the interests of the school’s statistics or the school’s fundraising,” she said in the video. “When people know that students who cheat are suspended for longer than students that rape their classmates, that sends the message that sexual violence isn’t that big of a deal.”

This video highlights a quote that Brodsky wrote when she tried to report an attempted rape.” In short, I was told to be a good girl. And for four years, I listened...because of our insistence on the femininity of victims, even male and genderqueer survivors are held to the good girl standard,” she wrote.

Brodsky explained that the Good Girl Standard women are always taught to be accommodating and to make the lives of men as easy as possible, but at a certain point, women need to be loud and angry to make sure their future is safer,” she said.

The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SAVE) is expanding requirements to include intimate partner violence and stalking and expands victim’s procedural rights, according to Carter. “Most importantly, the SAVE Act requires institutions to provide primary prevention education, which instead of treating the disease it inoculates against it. We want to change the culture on the front end that tolerates sexual violence so that we can actually begin to cut down on these numbers,” Carter said. ”We want to start changing these cultural barriers so that more victims will come forward and we can start addressing these problems.”

The SAVE Act requires University officials to report sexual offenses to law enforcement authorities and provide contact information and legal, counseling, health and advocacy services to victims. The SAVE Act will be enforced starting in the fall of 2014. RAINN is another anti-sexual violence organization that is fighting sexual assault.

Watch the video here.