Woman uses an auditorium full of students to reframe how we think about sexual assault |
Sexual Assault is a topic many people don’t want to think about, but it’s an unfortunate reality for some. Due to the topic being uncomfortable and often stigmatized, there can be a misunderstanding around how prevalent sexual assault is. Brittany Piper is an author, sexual assault educator, and survivor who uses a unique approach to highlight the number of those impacted.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and April 1st marks the anniversary of Piper’s assault. To commemorate the occasion, she created a compilation video of an activity she performs during her training sessions at college campuses. The video was uploaded to her social media page, where it has amassed over four million views.
The video gives a visual representation of the startling statistics. Someone is sexually assaulted every minute in the United States, and every nine minutes, a child is sexually assaulted, according to RAINN. They also reveal that “An estimated 443,635 people age 12 experience sexual violence each year in the U.S.” and that “26.4% of female and 6.8% of male undergraduate students experience rape or sexual assault involving physical force, violence, or incapacitation.”
Those staggering statistics make Piper’s visual depiction more powerful. Piper focused the camera on different groups of college students in lecture halls. She asks the students to stand if they know someone who has experienced sexual assault or if they themselves have experienced it. In each video, nearly every student stands up. Piper tells the different groups of students to remain standing if the assault was reported. Almost instantly, the majority of people sat down.
As students look around taking inventory of how many were still standing, the educator asks one last question. For the few students who were still on their feet, she asked them to stay standing if the perpetrator received any punishment for their actions. In a heartbreaking visual, approximately 4 to 5 students remained standing in total.
“The creaking of chairs. It’s a visceral symphony etched into my bones,” Piper writes. She later adds, “Today, as I stitched together just a few of the stages my body remembers, the pattern is heartbreakingly clear. Every time, when I ask who knows a survivor, it’s always too many.”
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Gen Z may have a clearer understanding of what constitutes sexual assault and be more likely to share their experience with others. A meta-analysis published by Science Direct that looks at ACE (adverse childhood experiences) scores shows Gen Z is less likely to have experienced childhood sexual assault than Gen X.
Viewers of the video were moved by the sheer number of people who sat back down. One person shares, “So many standing followed by so many sitting down breaks my heart.”
Another laments, “I guarantee the boys still sitting DO know someone who’s a survivor. They just don’t realize it because the person hasn’t told them.”
One man is calling for accountability, writing, “Men this is on us. We need to call anyone, anywhere, anytime we see something…. To start … let’s look in the mirror at our own behavior.”
Someone else has a sad revelation, writing, “It hits hard when you realize that she can do this in any city in the usa and get the exact same results. She wasn’t surprised, she knew what would happen when she asked those questions, no matter where she was in the usa.”
“The visual is overwhelming. Made me cry,” another person says.
“Thank you for your work. This is a such powerful way to show rape culture and the impunity in our society,” someone shares.
Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, you’re not alone. RAINN offers free, confidential support, 24/7 in English and Spanish through their National Sexual Assault Hotline. Call 1-800-656-HOPE (4637), text “HOPE” to 64673 or chat at RAINN.org/hotline.
When asked to describe what Tanzania smells like, Grace Isekore closes her eyes and breathes in deep. For a moment, she’s somewhere else entirely. Tanzania is a rich tapestry of sights and scents, from the smell of sea mist that permeates the coastline to the earthy cardamom and cloves she cooks with in her kitchen. But when Grace emerges from her reverie, her answer is unexpected.
“Tanzania smells like peace,” she says, her eyes still closed. “I see a beautiful country where we are free to move, free to speak. And there is peace within the community.”
For Grace, that sense of peace isn’t just something she smells; it’s something she works toward every day. As a project coordinator with Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC), a women-led organization that empowers pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania, she has seen firsthand how girls flourish when they have the opportunity to attend school. Like scent, education not only connects girls to their own culture, but also helps broaden their horizons, realizing new possibilities for themselves and others. That transformation reshapes entire communities and ripples outward, with the potential to change countries and transform the world for the better.
Different scents, different approaches, and communities driving change
For Grace and others around the world, education is freedom, as well as a pathway to a stronger community. Rooted in that shared belief, Pura, a home fragrance company, was inspired to build on their four-year partnership with Malala Fund to create something truly unique: a fragrance collection that connects people through scent to communities in Tanzania, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Brazil, where barriers to girls’ education are among the highest.
Using ingredients from each region, the new Pura x Malala Fund Collection uses scent to transport people to these regions directly. “Future in Bloom,” for example, invokes Pakistan’s lush valleys through notes of jasmine, cedarwood, and mango; while Tanzania’s fragrance, “Heart on Fire,” evokes the spirit and joyfulness of the girls who live there through cardamom, lemon, and green tea.
The new Collection honors the work Malala Fund does every day, partnering with locally-led organizations in these four countries to ensure every girl can access and complete 12 years of education. Each scent celebrates the joy, tenacity, and courage of the women and girls driving change on the ground, while also augmenting Pura’s annual grant to Malala Fund by donating eight percent of net revenue from the Pura x Malala Fund Collection to Malala Fund directly.
Just as each country’s scent is unique, so too are their needs related to education. But with support from Malala Fund and Pura, local leaders are coming up with creative ways to mobilize entire communities (parents, teachers, elders, and the students themselves, in their pursuit of solutions, understanding that educating girls helps everyone thrive. Here’s how their efforts are creating real, durable impact in Tanzania and Pakistan, and creating a ripple effect that changes the world for the better.
Parent-teacher associations help Maasai girls and their communities in Tanzania problem-solve
Northern Tanzania, Grace’s home, is home to pastoralist communities like the Maasai, a nomadic people who have moved with the seasons to nurture the land and care for their livestock for centuries. The nomadic nature of this lifestyle creates significant and unique barriers to girls’ education. Longstanding gender roles have enabled Maasai to survive in the harsh environment and have placed great value on both women and men. Over time, as nomadic life has been threatened by the privatization of land and stationary education models have been implemented, the reality of pastoralist livelihood has shifted and introduced new complexities. Now, the sheer distance to schools is both a practical challenge and one that often comes with danger from the landscape, predators, and potential exposure to assault along the journey. Girls shoulder the responsibility of household chores and there is often cultural pressure around early marriage – both leading to boys’ education being prioritized over girls’.
“There are very, very good [pastoralist] cultural practices, which are passed from generation to generation,” says Janet Kimori, an English teacher at Lekule Girls Secondary School in Longido, Tanzania. But when cultural practices act as educational barriers, “you have to sit down and look for where you are going to assist. As a school, as an individual, the school administration—all of us will chip in and know how we are going to deal with this problem.”
PWC works to ensure girls are able to exercise their right to an education while also preserving pastoralist culture. One successful approach, the organization found, has been the formation of Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), created with help from Malala Fund. In PTA meetings, students, parents, teachers, elders, and government officials meet, discuss educational barriers, and come up with community-led solutions that preserve and honor their culture while advancing educational outcomes.
One recent PTA meeting highlights how these community-led solutions are often the most effective. At Lekule Girls Secondary School, the lack of fresh water forces girls to walk long distances to collect water for the school’s kitchen during the school day, and these long journeys not only disrupt class time but can leave girls vulnerable to sexual assault in isolated areas. Through facilitated discussion, PTA members landed on a solution: installing a borehole to pipe in fresh water to the school. Reliable access to water creates a better learning environment for the girls, but it also benefits the community at large, as local governments are then more likely to invest in health clinics and other community resources nearby.
With a solution in place, the PTA was then able to discuss ideas and map out a course of action. The women would raise money for the cost of the borehole, while the men would recruit workers to dig the hole and lay the pipe. Together, they would ask government officials to match their investment.
The benefits of PTA meetings within the pastoralist communities are undeniable. “The girls are talking and addressing issues in a confident way, and parents feel they are part of the resource team to solve challenges happening at school,” Grace says. One unexpected benefit: The larger cultural impact these PTA meetings have created. Thanks to the success of PTAs within pastoralist communities, the models are now being endorsed on a national level, and schools across Tanzania are starting to use them to solve problems in their own communities. When a community creates opportunities for girls to learn, everyone benefits.
Safe spaces in rural Pakistan help students and their parents connect, then drive change
A continent away in Pakistan, the country’s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan seems like a land untouched by time. The region’s looming mountains, snow-capped peaks, lush valleys and crystalline lakes draw nature lovers and landscape photographers from around the world, but living among this kind of breathtaking scenery has its drawbacks. Schools in the region are few and far between, and the area’s harsh climate often makes roads inaccessible for travel. Poverty and gender-based discrimination are additional obstacles, making school even further out of reach, and girls are affected disproportionately. Going up against these barriers requires a persistent, quiet strength that’s found in the women who live there and reflected in Pakistan’s signature scent.
Saheli Circles are how local leaders in Gilgit-Baltistan are bridging the gap between girls and education. An Urdu term for “female friend,” Saheli Circles are after-school safe spaces where girls explore subjects like art and climate change, while also developing skills that help them manage emotions, set goals, and build positive relationships. Girls study in groups, visit the library, play sports, and tackle filmmaking and photography projects, all designed to develop self confidence and teach the girls how to advocate for issues that matter to them. But the work doesn’t stop there.
“What we’re trying to achieve here will only be impactful if it trickles down to the home environment and the school environment,” says Marvi Sumro, founder and program director of Innovate, Educate, and Inspire Pakistan (IEI), the local organization that developed the Saheli Circles model and partnered with Malala Fund in 2021 to make it a reality. Ever since, Saheli Circles have grown to involve teachers, elders, and parents to encourage relationship building that’s essential for young girls and........