The Women’s Resource Center began a month-long effort to raise awareness about sexual assault Monday night with the fourth annual Take Back the Night, an international women’s activist movement with the goal of making women feel comfortable being out at night.

This year’s event at Sacramento State broke from the traditional format of ending with a march across campus in lieu of sending participants, mostly from the Greek system, to local bars to pass out coasters labeled with facts about the connection between alcohol, drugs and sexual assault.

Pi Kappa Epsilon, The Queer Straight Alliance, Sigma Pi Alpha, Sigma Omicron Pi and Tau Kappa Epsilon all participated in the event. Sigma Phi Epsilon was registered, but did not attend the event.

Each group approached bars with the idea of passing out the coasters and asked permission to do so on Monday night.

Hien Le, vice president of philanthropy for the Sigma Omicron Pi sorority, said she had a difficult time finding bars that wanted to participate because, she said, they didn’t want to scare people away from drinking.

Justin Gomez, community service chair for Pi Kappa Alpha, said he didn’t have any trouble receiving approval from Limelight and Longshots because the owners are friends of the fraternity.

He said he wanted to get his fraternity involved in the event to show that fraternities, often associated with alcohol abuse and sexual assault, do not condone acts of sexual violence.

“As a fraternity we automatically get a bad rap as womanizers, so we are here to show that we are against sexual violence and to speak out against it,” Gomez said.

Before the groups passed out coasters at local bars, they listened to two speakers and watched a self-defense demonstration by Midge Marino, who teaches self-defense as a kinesiology course at Sac State and has taught self-defense classes for 34 years.

The first speaker, Rachel, was raped at 17 and could not give her last name because her case is still pending.

She opened her speech with “Rape: It’s such a small and simple word for something so heinous.”

She talked about the impact her experience had on her life and her family, as well as the psychological problems many rape victims face.

She said that men’s involvement in sexual assault awareness can make a difference because if men know that other men will stand up for a woman they see being attacked, then they will be less likely to attack a woman.

Marino also urged men to stand up and fight for victims and never to say: “She asked for it.” She also encouraged women to take one of her classes.

Another speaker at the event told participants of a new movement called the White Ribbon Campaign, a movement that asks men to wear a white ribbon as a personal pledge to never commit, condone nor remain silent about violence against women.

The movement began in Montreal in response to the shooting of 14 women because they were labeled as feminists by the shooter.

There was a white paper ribbon displayed on stage for men to sign their pledge and white ribbons for them to pin on after signing. The ribbon was covered with signatures from the fraternity members who attended the event.

The Women’s Resource Center will be having events throughout the month, including a three-hour self-defense workshop by Marino on April 18.

For more information about Women’s Resource Center events, visit www.csus.edu/wrc. To learn about the White Ribbon Campaign, visit www.whiteribbon.com

Rebecca Adler can reached at [email protected]