WASHINGTON — The White House launched an ambitious campaign Friday aimed at ending sexual assaults on college campuses, in part by enlisting major college sports leagues and prominent celebrities to get men involved in the effort.
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launched the initiative, called “It’s On Us,” at an event in the White House East Room. Lilly Jay, a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts who introduced Biden, spoke in stark personal terms about what it meant to be raped and the difficulty of trying to “reclaim college” afterward.
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“Recalling rape always hurts,” she said, adding that having those she called “allies” decry sexual assault makes things easier. “They help carry the heavy truth that colleges can, and should, be safer.”
Obama assured Jay: “This is not your fight alone. This is on all of us, every one of us, to fight campus sexual assault.
“We’ve got to have a fundamental shift in our culture” to prevent future assaults, the president said. “And it’s not just on the parents of young women to caution them. It is on the parents of young men to teach them respect for women.”
Biden, who scheduled a roundtable discussion on domestic violence Friday afternoon in Denver, addressed part of his remarks directly to men, declaring, “So step up, you guys. Speak out.”
“It’s on all of us to change the culture that asks the wrong questions, and our culture still asks the wrong questions,” he said, his voice growing louder as he got more emotional. “It is never the right question for a woman to ask, ‘What did I do?’ Never. Get this straight: Never is it appropriate for a woman to ask, ‘What did I do?’ The question is, ‘Why was that done to me, and will someone do something about it?’ ”
One in five women will be sexually assaulted while enrolled in college, many of them during their first year by someone they know, according to studies.
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