Sitting in my dorm room, I receive a call from my uncle. I pick it up and all I hear is, “Mackenzie! Are you alright over there? You need to carry pepper spray with you at all times and surround yourself with people you know and trust, okay? I’m not having anyone hurt my petite niece when she least expects it!” I began to think to myself, wow, even 170 miles away from home my uncle who rarely watches the news knows what I have to be afraid of at school. I am a freshman here at Grand Valley State. I was most definitely an independent person before I left for college, exploring areas of my city I’d never seen and getting to know all sorts of people throughout high school. Little did I know I’d have this feeling of independence ripped away from
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Grand Valley is a beautiful school that doesn’t deserve to be labeled with this hideous sexual assault name tag. This school participates in many ways to decrease these assaults, but by implementing more safety precautions and allowing students to have access to informational pages and applications, students will begin to feel a sense of security that has been lost.
August 23rd, 2016 was move in day for me. I received five e-mails within that first month of each sexual assault that occurred. One email I received before move-in-day on August 17th warning about an on campus sexual assault with two participants targeting one. The other four emails, I received on August 26th, 27th and September 22nd and 27th. Campus View, Trio Townhomes and 48th Avenue were the culprit locations. Grand Valley isn’t the only known university where sexual assaults have become more and more common. In 2014 at the University of Michigan, a survey was given to the female population out of the 43,000+ undergraduate students that were enrolled that year. Twenty-two and a half percent of the females that participated concluded that they experienced some form of nonconsensual misconduct during that year. Of these 22.5%, only 3.9% said they reported their incidents to the …show more content…
In fact, they are already many steps ahead of us. GVPD’s twitter page, created in January of 2014, plays a huge role in sharing important information with the student body. Their page allows students to follow them in order to stay updated on information they post to the outside world. As of right now, their Twitter page has 2,316 followers and 1,492 tweets. These tweets consist of important messages about school closings, questions to students about potential criminals they need to find and allowing students to post photos and send in anonymous tips about any suspicions they’ve seen around campus. Kathie Felix, author of Internet@Schools magazine states, “nearly half of online teens, 47%, have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of teens who have posted photos said that people comment on the images at least some of the time” (Felix). This proves that if the student body took advantage of the GVPD’s Twitter page, posting photos of suspects they see, half of the students’ own followers would see the photos which would inform a majority of the student body. Only here, there is a small dilemma. Their Twitter page has only 2,316 followers yet there are 25,000+ students attending this university. Now it is clear that many people may not have access to this specific social media page throughout the day, nor have any social media pages in their name, but this is where the
Grand Valley is a beautiful school that doesn’t deserve to be labeled with this hideous sexual assault name tag. This school participates in many ways to decrease these assaults, but by implementing more safety precautions and allowing students to have access to informational pages and applications, students will begin to feel a sense of security that has been lost.
August 23rd, 2016 was move in day for me. I received five e-mails within that first month of each sexual assault that occurred. One email I received before move-in-day on August 17th warning about an on campus sexual assault with two participants targeting one. The other four emails, I received on August 26th, 27th and September 22nd and 27th. Campus View, Trio Townhomes and 48th Avenue were the culprit locations. Grand Valley isn’t the only known university where sexual assaults have become more and more common. In 2014 at the University of Michigan, a survey was given to the female population out of the 43,000+ undergraduate students that were enrolled that year. Twenty-two and a half percent of the females that participated concluded that they experienced some form of nonconsensual misconduct during that year. Of these 22.5%, only 3.9% said they reported their incidents to the …show more content…
In fact, they are already many steps ahead of us. GVPD’s twitter page, created in January of 2014, plays a huge role in sharing important information with the student body. Their page allows students to follow them in order to stay updated on information they post to the outside world. As of right now, their Twitter page has 2,316 followers and 1,492 tweets. These tweets consist of important messages about school closings, questions to students about potential criminals they need to find and allowing students to post photos and send in anonymous tips about any suspicions they’ve seen around campus. Kathie Felix, author of Internet@Schools magazine states, “nearly half of online teens, 47%, have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of teens who have posted photos said that people comment on the images at least some of the time” (Felix). This proves that if the student body took advantage of the GVPD’s Twitter page, posting photos of suspects they see, half of the students’ own followers would see the photos which would inform a majority of the student body. Only here, there is a small dilemma. Their Twitter page has only 2,316 followers yet there are 25,000+ students attending this university. Now it is clear that many people may not have access to this specific social media page throughout the day, nor have any social media pages in their name, but this is where the