{"id":310,"date":"2017-12-12T13:54:42","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T18:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/?p=310"},"modified":"2018-02-27T10:55:22","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T15:55:22","slug":"take-back-the-night-through-the-lens-of-a-peacebuilder-by-ben-rush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/2017\/12\/12\/take-back-the-night-through-the-lens-of-a-peacebuilder-by-ben-rush\/","title":{"rendered":"Take Back The Night Through The Eyes of a Peacebuilder by Ben Rush"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first full week of November EMU held their annual <\/span>Take Back The Night<\/span><\/a> week. \u00a0This event\u2019s purpose is to prevent sexual violence by educating, creating spaces to address the issue, and having conversations. \u00a0This year, I had the opportunity to be involved in some of the planning. \u00a0I ended up helping to plan an event for just men titled \u2018How Language Legitimizes: A Second look at what we don\u2019t think of twice\u2019. \u00a0Even though I had only ever attended one TBTN event in my life, I was excited for this chance to hold a space for men to talk about sexual violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

My co-planner and I both agreed that we wanted to move the focus of the conversation away from the obvious symptoms of the problem: the instances of harassment and assault we, as decent men, publicly display disgust for. \u00a0We instead wanted to look at how our culture enables these things to happen in ways most \u2018decent men\u2019 are all too complicit in. \u00a0I think my training as a peacebuilder is one of the reasons I thought we should take this approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my training as a peacebuilder, I have learned that societal problems are not solved by only dealing with their symptoms, by only giving attention to the places where the problem bubbles onto the surface. \u00a0The value of the peacebuilding field is that it looks deeper than symptoms and goes after the systemic cause of conflict and injustice. \u00a0Peacebuilding is for when people realize that just fighting the symptoms of a problem means fighting the same problem for generations without making real progress. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At \u2018How Language Legitimizes\u2019, we had a conversation about how the obvious sexual violence we see is propped up by a culture that does not confront sexually aggressive behavior — a culture that says: \u201cboys will be boys\u201d, \u201cshe was asking for it\u201d, and \u201cyou\u2019d look prettier if you smiled\u201d — a culture where messages of sexual violence find their way into our everyday language so often that it is rarely questioned. \u00a0Yet it needs to be questioned if our desire to do something about sexual violence is to have any meaning. \u00a0If all we do is wait to respond to sexual violence after it occurs, we will already be too late. \u00a0Only by digging deeply and taking a stand where the problem begins can we hope to see its end. \u00a0It may not be easy, but solving problems this big never are.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was encouraged by the depth in which the men who came to the event explored this issue. \u00a0It seemed like we were ready to look at the problem as something we all, as men, contribute to, rather than keeping it at arm\u2019s length. \u00a0What we need more than people who want to intervene when violence happens are people who are willing to take the first steps to ensure that it never does. \u00a0I saw people like that at our event. \u00a0You can be one too.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ben Rush is a student in the <\/span><\/i>Peacebuilding and Development (PXD) program<\/span><\/i><\/a> at <\/span><\/i>²ÝÝ®ÉçÇø (EMU)<\/span><\/i><\/a> and was a member of the student planning team for this year\u2019s Take Back the Night week. To learn more about sexual violence and how you can respond, visit Grace: Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment<\/a>. If you have experienced sexual violence and need support, contact RAINN<\/a>. If you have experienced sexual violence or any threat to your safety on EMU’s campus or in relation to a member of the EMU community, we encourage you to file a campus safety incident report<\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Photo of a Take Back The Night program<\/a> courtesy of The Weathervane, EMU’s student newspaper, which published an article about this year’s event<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first full week of November EMU held their annual Take Back The Night week. \u00a0This event\u2019s purpose is to prevent sexual violence by educating, creating spaces to address the issue, and having conversations. \u00a0This year, I had the opportunity to be involved in some of the planning. \u00a0I ended up helping to plan an … Continue reading Take Back The Night Through The Eyes of a Peacebuilder by Ben Rush<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,59,19,61,60,57,58],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-grace","tag-masculinity","tag-peacebuilding","tag-rainn","tag-sexual-violence","tag-take-back-the-night","tag-the-weathervane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/75\/2017\/12\/TBTN-6-750x410.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p95hha-50","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/pxd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}