History

     In the Fall of 1990, the Syracuse University R.A.P.E. Center
was founded in responce to the courageous activsm of a group of
Syracuse University students who had become "concerned abour rape
education." S.C.A.R.Ed was comprised of, and supported by,
students who had become alarmed at the seeming increase of
incidents of rape and sexual assault on campus over the past
academic year. It is difficult to know with any certainty whether
there was in fact an increase, or whether local news journalists
had become more conscious of the problem and thus more willing to
publicize it. I tend to think the latter.
     To address the problem, the Chancellor appointed a task force
to investigate the sitaution. High on the list of recommendations
presented to the Chancellor was the formation of a campus rape
center which would provide counceling and advocacy services, as
well as educational programming. The Chancellor complied, the
Univerity R.A.P.E. Center was organized, Joan Gibson was appointed
its first director, and in the fall of 1991, Sue Rochman was
appointed the first education coordinator/graduate assistant.
     In its earlist days, the R.A.P.E. Center's educational
programming consisted primarily of lectures, informational
workshops, and video discussions designed to share campus rape
statistics, facts, defintion, and policies; to expose the
interpersonal behaviors and gender stereotypes that serve to
perpetuate or condone nonconsensual sexual activity; and to raise
awareness of the counseling, advocacy, and educational services
offered by the R.A.P.E. Center.
     In the Spring of 1992, Richard Marcus, Indira Makraki, and I
joined forces with education Coordinator Sue Rochman and became
the founding members of e5m. We were graduate directing students
in the S.U. Department of Drama, we each had a personal interest
in eradicating the problem of rape and other socio-political ills
on campus and in society, and we each tended to direct our formal
theatrical productions from a standpoint of socio-political
consciousness.
     In the beginning we envisioned e5m as an interactive theatre
group dedicated to rape education, and only tangently to rape
activism. As our work progressed, and as time and our methodology
progressed, we were to learn thatthis was an arbitrary and false
division, that one cannot be a rape educator without, on some
level, being an activist.
     In the Fall of 1993, I was appointed the education
coordinator and, by default, the coordinator of Rape Awareness
Week. With my leadership and guidance, e5m members were a major
force in the organization of Rape Awareness Week events, including
a "funky...musical-poetry-reader's-theatre presentation" (Levin 5)
at a local coffeehouse, guerrila tehatre in the student union, a
workshop deisnged to deconstruct the images of rape survivors on
television shows like Picket Fences and Beverly Hills 90210, an
open mike at the union coffeehouse, an editorial campaign in the
student newspaper, and the annual Take Back the Night march and
rally.
     A small committee of e5m members, in concert with members of
S.C.A.R.Ed., also facilitated a petition drive and a series of
meetings with University officials deisgned to pressure the
judicial system into reviewing and clarifying S.U.'s policy on
nonconsensual sexual activity such that there is a recognition of
a rape continuum. These student activists believe that the
University is in inadvertent collusion with rape perpetrators as
long as acquaintance rape is sanctioned to the same degree as,
say, a student found guilty of imappropriate or unwelcome sexual
touching for fondling. At present, the Chancellor and judicial
system administrations are looking into ways of determining
degrees of magniture for varying incidents of sexual assault while
still maintaining the flexibility of the present system. A major
sticking point has been the Univeristy's contention that the
judicial board is there to educate rather than prosecure
peretrators.
     In spite of our initially myopic vision, the theatrical work
and the political activism of e5m has always been grounded in
current research and theories of rape and sexual assault that
posit these criminal activities as the outward symptoms of greated
social sicknesses. We have worked to reflect, in our performances
and in our public demonstrations, our understanding of the
underlying issues of gender socialization and stereotyping, ritual
dating violence, substance abuse, and racial and class
discrimination as the breeding ground for rape and sexual assault.
Robin Warshaw's I Never Called It Rape has become a mainstay in
our curriculum, and we believe, as Warshaw asserts, that while

          [s]ome dismiss acquaintance rape as just a case of
          boys being boys-- that is, men exuberantly
          playing the natural male sexual imperative to
          rape when aroused..[n]othing could be father from
          the truth of what is "natural"... Rape is not
          an integral part of the male nature, but the means
          by which men programmed for violence express their
          sexual selves. (46, 47)
          Some people hope that improving the woman's
          ability to clearly communicate what she wants
          will naturally lead the man to understand how
          to proceed... [But] many men have been
          conditioned to simply ignore women-- whether
          those women are responding positively or
          pushing, fighting, kicking, crying, or otherwise
          resisting them. (42)

Back in the Spring semester of 1991, having been inspired by the
work of Cornell University's interactive tehatre program "Sex at
Seven," Sue Rochman beganto see to the need for such educational
programming at the Syracuse University R.A.P.E. Center. She had
come to believe that, even with the standard programming available
to the university community-- the informational workships, the
video disucssions, and the lectures-- something was missing. To
Sue, that something was a program that would actively engage
university students, a program that would capture their attention
while simultaneously challenging them to have an active role in
engendering knowledge of campus rape and sexual assault issues.
What was needed, perhaps more imporntantly, was a program that
would help students to discover their own solutions to the
problem.
     Sue's idea was to organizse a troupe of actors who would
create and perform scenarios that were disturbingly close to home,
and to devise a program around these scenes in which audience
members would be invidted to interrogate the characters about the
chosies they made or failed to make. Having discovered what she
believed to be a dynamic way of educating the university
community, but at the same time having no theatrical training, Sue
put out a call for graduate directing students to assist in the
development of the group and the development of believable,
dramatic, and yet educational scenes.
     Sue, Rich, Indira, and I put our heads together, got clear on
our objectives, and devised a plan. We all agreed that the
interactive theatre process would be a powerful way to encourage
students to take responsiblility for their own education regarding
campus rape and sexual assault issues, and ultimately to take
repsonsiblity for their roles in making changes in their own lives
and in their own communities. We agreed that the actors who would
become involved should be guided toward the createion of their won
dramatic scenes through a combination of intensive reading,
discussion, and improvisation drama.
     The following summer was the be spent by Rich, Indira, and
myself reading scholarly articles, magazine articles, newspaper
articles, and book exceprts on the subject-- focusing primarily on
rape statistics, the connection between acquantance rape and
alcohol, rape as an extreme point on a continuum of nonconsensual
sexual behaviors and socially sanctioned violence against women,
as well as the principles and strategies of drama in education. We
also previewed videotaped documentaries and dramatizations.
     Having been trained in crisis hotline counseling at the Dane
County Rape Center in Madison, WI, and having earned an M.S. In
Eudcational Drama and Theatre at the Louisiana State University, I
was no stranger to the subject of rape and sexual assault, nor was
I a stranger to the techniques of drama in education. An dyet,
nothing in my life, or in my training had ever prepared me for the
intensity of task to which I had firmly committed my time and
energy, heart and soul-- the rigorous intellectualism and
emotionalism engendered through our research, our dramatic
(re)enactments, and our in-depth discussion of sexual violence.
     The followign Fall semester we hosted our first
organizational meeting. Through a campaign of flyers, phoe calls,
and word-of-mouth, we recurited performers with diverse
backgrounds-- acting, directing, psychology being predominant. We
only asked that potential members had enough ease with performance
such that our work would not be overly focused on actor training,
and that potential members had a strong commitment to the
eradication of sexual violence on campus.
     That first year, and every year since, we drew a fair number
of surviros and close friends of survivors. So, an additional part
of work, of necessity, involved the screening of especially
survivors through a questionaire seen only by the education
coordinator and through individual meetings with the education
coordinator. The goal here was not the exclude, but rather to make
sure that group members were assited in maintaining their own
emotional health. The nature of out improvisational work was such
that any of the wounds we had manged to heal or to hide over time
were bound to be re-opened. And so, fron the outset, we worked to
create a working environment and a group process that was rigorous
in terms of our growing knowledge of rape nd sexual assault
issues, but at the same time nurturing, safe, and confidential.