To raise awareness about violence within relationships and share ways to prevent it, Syracuse University’s R.A.P.E. Center will hold a panel discussion titled “Recognizing Red Flags: Moving Toward Healthy Relationships” on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

The event is the beginning of the annual Take Back the Night campaign and a precursor to the main event on April 14, when students will rally outside of Hendricks Chapel, march down to Marshall Street and back, and speak out about how violence has affected them. The topic of this year’s panel is dating violence. It will focus on preventing relationship violence and the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship, said Janet Epstein, the associate director of the R.A.P.E Center.

“The week before, we like to raise people’s awareness about how this does affect everybody’s life,” Epstein said.

A panel is organized by students and held each year to discuss different issues regarding violence, Epstein said. Previous years’ topics have included violence in the media and talking to children about violence.

This year’s topic is based on the “Red Flag Campaign,” which originated in Virginia in 2005 with the aim of encouraging awareness and education of relationship violence among college students, according to the campaign’s Web site.

“Part of what we’d like to do is talk about how to identify, both for ourselves and amongst our friends, what might be a flag that there’s a problem within a relationship,” Epstein said, “and then discuss what we can do as a community to support one another and to get the message out that we all want our members to be respected.”

Amit Taneja, the associate director of SU’s LGBT Resource Center who will be participating in the panel, said the panel members are trying to deepen the conversation of a topic that is often seen as taboo or makes people uncomfortable.

“While our culture generally is very centered around the idea of love and relationships — and everybody’s trying to find love — it’s much harder to talk about what happens when the relationship’s unhealthy,” Taneja said. “But we’re giving voice to those concerns in a public way.”

The panel will discuss what some of the “red flags” of an unhealthy relationship are and what family and friends outside the relationship — “empowered bystanders” — can do to help, Epstein said.

“Sometimes, it takes the love and care to bring it to the attention of a loved one,” Taneja said. “It’s very difficult, but if you really care for someone, you should take that step. We’re hoping to cover all those different points.”

Epstein said she hopes the audience will gain a sense of how to assess the messages people receive every day that normalize violence in relationships, understand where they come from and know it’s not something people have to accept, she said.

“There are ways to prevent violence and help foster a respectful community,” Epstein said. “It’s everybody’s issue, and everybody can do something to make this a safer campus.”

 

Published on April 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm