The College Fix

A student-funded campus group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called “Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment” handed out little pamphlets on campus titled “10 Ways not to be a Jerk” and “10 More Ways not to be an Asshole.”

The suggestions, directed at men while interacting with women, included:

• When talking to a woman look in her eyes, not her chest.
• When a woman is upset, angry, or voices her opinion, don’t call her names, or ask if it’s that time of the month.
• Take down pictures of naked or otherwise objectified women in your rooms.
• Don’t try to prove how cool you are by bragging about your sexual experiences, this isn’t junior high school.
• Accept “no” from a woman the first time she says it.

The lists offered no suggestions to women on how to interact with men.

PAVE members handed out the pamphlets to students on campus in December around the time news broke that a female student had allegedly been gang-raped at a fraternity at the University of Virginia, a claim that had eventually been debunked.

PAVE also runs a campus task force to help prevent sexual assault, and in December held a training for Greek fraternity pledges on preventing sexual assaults.

Asked this week by The College Fix whether PAVE believes the handouts were effective, and why they only directed advice toward men instead of both genders, the chair of the group, Hannah Serwe, explained they had been brought to campus by a speaker who gave a talk for “Stalking Awareness Month.”

Serwe also cited the website of the organization that made the handouts, We End Violence, which aims to “encourage men to see their role in preventing violence committed by other men, without forgetting that men too are victims, and that violence has no gender,” according to its website.

“It is important to know that while We End Violence does not believe that men are the sole cause or source of violence, we do believe that any real hope for bringing an end to violence must start with a challenge to men and masculinity,” the site adds.

According to PAVE’s Facebook page, their mission statement is “to prevent all forms of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and stalking through education and activism. PAVE acknowledges that these assaults continually occur in our community to a wide variety of people, regardless of sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, mental capacity, or physical capabilities.”

A slightly different mission statement can be found on their Tumblr page, which reads: “We are a student advocacy group on the UW-Madison campus dedicated to ending sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking through education and activism.”

PAVE is largely funded through non-voluntary students fees levied against students attending UW-Madison. PAVE generally receives about $83,000 a year in campus funding, and will have have received more than $249,000 in student fee money for the fiscal years of July 1, 2012, through this June, according to campus documents.

The Associated Students of Madison, which allocates student fee money, states online that they are neutral in their viewpoint of funding student organizations.

More recently, PAVE of UW-Madison accused Governor Scott Walker of being a supporter of “Rape Culture” in a tweet that spread the story that he wanted to end the reporting of sexual assault on college campuses. That accusation has been debunked, as the reporting of sexual assaults on college campuses is already mandatory under federal law, and Walker was simply asked by the university to delete repetitive mandates.

While PAVE acknowledged the inaccurate claims about Gov. Walker have been redacted on its Facebook page, the tweet remained up as of Thursday.

College Fix reporter David Hookstead is a student at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

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IMAGE:  David Hookstead, for The College Fix