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Sexual Assault Action Month

April is Sexual Assault Action Month (SAAM)! 

The purpose of CARE's annual Sexual Assault Action Month (SAAM) campaign is to increase the Northwestern community's understanding of the roots and impacts of sexual assault, to motivate all community members to contribute to prevention and survivor support, and to foster connection and healing for sexual assault survivors. It's important for us to remain involved in prevention and to support survivors year-round, but April provides a dedicated time for us to center these important issues.

This year, we transition from a sexual assault awareness month to an action month, recognizing that we have a collective responsibility to move beyond awareness and to do something to end sexual violence. For more information on the history of SAAM, you can check out the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) here.

Our theme for SAAM 2024 is “Our Bodies Belong to Us.” Body autonomy, or the right for each of us to freely and safely make decisions about our own bodies, is central to preventative consent cultures. Where body autonomy is denied or revoked, sexual assault is more prevalent and its impacts more severe. Marginalized people, such as LGBTQ+ youth, disabled people, BIPOC people, and people who can get pregnant, experience continued legal, political, and cultural threats targeting their body autonomy. We must work to dismantle these structural barriers if we hope to end sexual violence.

On an interpersonal level, many sexual violence survivors grieve their changed relationship with their bodies in the aftermath of assault. An important part of healing may be learning to feel at home in one's body again or, perhaps, for the first time. Accurate and destigmatizing knowledge about our bodies can be power, as can embodied healing practices that encourage us to reconnect with our values, boundaries, needs, and desires.

See below for more information about this year's SAAM events and follow us on Instagram @care.northwestern for programming updates and more opportunities to learn throughout the month.

For the full listing of SAAM Events click here

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