Students raise awareness about rape

Amanda Newman is poised and collected as she delivers the facts: Reports indicate 893 women in Utah were raped last year; one in three women is raped sometime during her lifetime. The 17-year-old looks down, though, when asked if she personally knows a victim of the crime.

"Yes," she says, quietly, reluctantly.

People don't like to talk about rape.

"It's uncomfortable," Newman says, grimacing.

On Wednesday morning, Newman and a few of her classmates at Rowland Hall Upper School set out to draw attention to a crime that occurs far too often in Utah. At 5:30 a.m., 19 high school students, all members of the school's extension of the Rotary Club, went to work setting up an illustration that would open up the dialogue about rape at Rowland Hall.

It was cold. It was raining. It was dark. But the students plugged away for more than an hour, planting 893 flags in the school's lawn. Newman waited until a morning assembly to tell her fellow students what the flags meant: one flag for every woman who was raped.

"You may think, 'I would never be raped,' " she said, "but the truth is that it's a big, scary possibility."

According to a 2007 study by the Utah Commission of Criminal and Juvenile Justice, 88.2 percent of rapes go unreported. Experts estimate the actual number of rapes in Utah at about 7,500.

"It's pretty startling to think about," said Heather Stringfellow, director of the Rape Recovery Center in Salt Lake City. The Rape Recovery Center was the beneficiary of a bake sale at Rowland Hall Wednesday.

Stringfellow said awareness is the best weapon against rapists.

"We need to hold offenders accountable," she said. "To do that we need to be enabling people to report."

To draw more attention to rape in Utah, the Rape Recovery Center and the Salt Lake City Mayor's Office on Diversity and Human Rights are co-sponsoring a Community Dialogue on Sexual Violence Oct. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m. The event, which will take place at the Sorensen Unity Center at 1383 S. 900 West in Salt Lake City, is free.

e-mail: estuart@desnews.com