Party Smart started out as a public awareness campaign to provide basic safety tips to local and visiting party goers on the Strip. Over time, as new research and best practices for violence prevention became available, Party Smart shifted to educating the public about active bystander intervention. A few years ago, that public education turned into structured training in bystander intervention for staff at bars and nightclubs. Today, Party Smart encompasses both the Stay SAFE (Sex Assault Free Environments) and SAint (Sexual Assault Intervention) trainings. In partnership with LVMPD Crime…
The epidemic of violence against Indigenous women reaches back beyond the beginnings of the United States as a nation. We now recognize how sexual violence has been deployed against Indigenous communities as a tactic of genocide. In recent history, we’ve made small moves to begin addressing this violence – like increasing protections for Indigenous women in the Violence Against Women Act. Now, following tireless activism by Indigenous communities, the federal government is taking significant action to address these issues. In October 2020, two bills seeking to address violence against Indigenous…
Earlier this month, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals restored the Texas ban on abortions after six weeks. Dr. Alan Braid of San Antonio is already facing multiple lawsuits under the “bounty hunting” provision of the ban, which allows any private citizen to sue a person who in some way assists or facilitates a patient’s access to abortion services to the tune of $10,000. This law is troubling enough even before noting the lack of exceptions for rape or incest. But this law doesn’t just leave out victims of…
The Atlanta shooting earlier this year resulted from an intersection of racism, sexism, and anti-sex-worker stigma that is not new to women of Asian descent. Historically in the US, racism and sexism have always intersected to create the hypersexualization of Women of Color. Sexualization is another way of saying sexual objectification, in which a person or group of people is treated as a sexual object instead of a person. When we talk about hypersexualization in this context, we are identifying the ways in which this dehumanizing objectification disproportionately affects Women…
On August 7th, the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents met to discuss, among other things, significant changes to Title IX policy recommendations from the Department of Education. It was during this meeting that Regent Lisa Levine spoke out to protect victims rights, and was summarily silenced by Dean Gould, Chief of Staff and Special Counsel to the Board of Regents. But this fight to defend the rights of victims didn’t start at this meeting; instead it started the day before, on the morning of August 6th, when…