With the possibility of a one year suspension of growth looming, University of Oregon’s Fraternity and Sorority Life has built a student team to show its dedication to preventing sexual assault.
Justin Shukas, director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, said that this program was initiated by a couple of students within FSL and then voted on by Panhellenic Council and Interfraternity Council.
“The students wanted to get together and talk about the issue and what they could do to fix that, but there wasn’t much direction, so we tried to connect them with the right staff members that could help them out,” Shukas said.
From there, the curriculum for the task force will come from Kerry Frazee, director of sexual assault prevention and education in the dean of students office.
Kerry has made curriculum specifically for this task force in order to best suit the needs of the FSL community.
This program consists of one member from each chapter who will act as a liaison between the program and their chapter. These elected members will meet weekly, learning different aspects of how to be better educated on preventing sexual violence.
According to Kerry Frazee, the chapters will be learning about bystander intervention, consent statements surrounding rape culture and peer-to-peer mentoring of the sexual violence efforts.
Although Kerry will be the main source of education for this program, guest speakers who are also experts on this topic will come and speak at some of the sessions. This will include trauma response from the counseling center and other representatives from the dean of students office.
Members of this task force, although new to the program, have started planning ways that they can best implement their new skills.
Henry Korman, representative from Delta Upsilon, said that he will take a proactive approach within his chapter to ensure the success of the program. This will come in the form of relaying information during chapter meetings and making sure he understands the needs of his brothers by knowing what they want and need to learn about
Knowing how to best use the skills taught through this program will be imperative to making the task force successful. In addition, FSL has over 2,000 members, and when they come together, they can do a lot of good for the community.
“We have a big, powerful group on campus, that has a very focused voice that we can actually use to educate people,” Korman said.
If the task force is successful within Oregon’s FSL, this program could be implemented to fraternities and sororities at universities nationwide.
The hope among individuals involved with this program is that it will be successful within the Greek community, and in turn can be beneficial to all Oregon students.
“It’s stuff that we can bring back to our chapters, and then educate everyone,” Korman said.