TiB Otago Day of Action

You may have noticed that our campus looked a little different today. You may have noticed tags around campus that have sexual violence statistics on them, maybe you noticed the black banners hanging in buildings, or maybe you even saw that people’s profile pictures changed for the day.

Today was Thursdays in Black's national Day of Action, and campus groups across the country worked extra hard on their campus to stand in solidarity with survivors of sexual violence. 

We often say that “a different reality is possible” because right now, the reality of sexual violence on tertiary campuses in Aotearoa simply isn’t good enough. We know from the ‘In Our Own Words’ report (O’Neill, 2017) that of those surveyed, 89% of women experienced sexual harassment during their time in tertiary education. 61% of minority gender respondents experienced sexual assault during their time in tertiary education. 86% of Māori respondents experienced sexual harassment during their time in tertiary education. These statistics might be shocking to some, yet for others this is unsurprising - it may even be the unfortunate truth about their time at university.

At Thursdays in Black, we aim to show solidarity with and support for survivors of sexual violence. We do this by - and you might have already guessed this - wearing black on Thursdays. We thought that we would expand this to campus buildings as well. Our aim with this was visibility - visibility of the issue of sexual violence, and also visibility that there is a student-led movement on campus working towards a world free from sexual violence. 

That’s us. We’re doing the work towards a world free from sexual violence. And that starts with all of us wearing black every Thursday to stand in solidarity with survivors of sexual violence. See you next week, in black.