Anxiety has pervaded Athens and the Ohio University campus in recent weeks in the wake of six sexual assaults reported to Athens and OU Police departments so far this fall semester.
OU’s top administrators – including most recently, OU President Duane Nellis – and the Athens and OU police chiefs all have issued statements about the reported sexual assaults, and both administrators and the police recently held group discussions on the issue.
Students, meanwhile, also have responded to the reports with their own grassroots efforts to tackle the issue. Multiple OU campus sororities and fraternities put up banners with messages such as “Consent is sexy (with the word ‘sexy’ crossed out – underneath the word ‘mandatory’ written in)”; “Our bodies, our rules”; and “‘No’ does not mean ‘convince me.’”
OU junior Sydney Numbers, president of the Alpha Omicron Pi chapter at OU, shared a photo with The NEWS Sunday of a banner unfurled in front of that fraternity chapter’s house on Church Street in uptown Athens that read, “Yes mean yes, no means no. Whatever we wear, wherever we go.”
Numbers said the slogan came from a chant during last year’s Take Back the Night march and rally in Athens.
