Students stage walkout against sexual violence

Drivers honked from their cars as they passed dozens of students holding handmade signs outside Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) Thursday for a school walkout against sexual violence. 

The walkout was organized as part of the movement “Stop Sexual Violence: From the Frat House to the White House,” which called for a day of action and demonstrations in communities and on school campuses across the country. The protests are part of the intense outcry over an alleged sexual assault of a female student at Cornell University by seven fraternity members in 2024 as well as backlash against the college’s handling of the case.

As students and staff chanted “I am Jane Doe” and held signs that said “There are no bystanders in rape” and “Stop protecting rapists,” many of the cars that passed by on Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road signaled their support. 

Senior Tessa Schultz is a member of Stand with Everyone Against Rape (SWEAR), an initiative at MVRHS that educates male and female students to confront rape culture and play active roles against gender-based violence. She said that she wants the walkout to inform others about both the Cornell case and sexual violence in general. 

“I hope that more people get awareness of this case specifically and, in general, the sexual assault cases in colleges and in our world that many people don’t know about and the repercussions that should come with that,” Schultz said.

Senior and SWEAR member Ilanna Batista emphasized the importance of activism efforts that go beyond social media.  

“A lot of people just like to repost or talk about it, and we feel like taking action … The high school is a big center of our community on the Island, so it just really shows we all take action and initiative,” she said.

Batista expressed her fears about sexual violence as a female student headed to college next year. 

“It’s really scary as a girl who’s about to go to college and a high school student that this is the reality we live in,” she said. “Even though it’s a hard change, we must start to change, or there will never be one.”

For Batista, taking an initiative against sexual violence includes educating others about the social conditioning that promotes it in the first place.

School adjustment counselors Matt Malowski and Amy Lilavois are the faculty advisors for SWEAR. They highlighted the differences between the initial conversations they had with the group’s male and female students about the Cornell case.

Initially, Malowski said that the male students took a more analytical approach to the situation.

“There were a lot of questions because where they’re getting their information from was all over the place. They were confused as to how this could happen,” Malowski said. “They were so flabbergasted as to how many levels of failure there were.”

Malowski emphasized the need to recruit men into sexual violence prevention efforts and conversations.

“There’s a lot of boys that I even talked to today that don’t even know what the Cornell thing is,” Malowski said. “We have to invite them to step in. The adults need to not assume that the boys are angry and know what’s going on.”

On the other hand, Lilavois said that the female students’ initial reactions focused more on personal feelings.

“For the girls, there was a lot of fear, rage, shock but not shock,” Lilavois said. “One of the reasons I wanted to meet with them is because they’re applying to colleges right now, and this adds another level. Leaving is bittersweet, and it’s exciting and frightening … And then you add on this culture that exists on so many college campuses, and it’s very scary for them.”  

Senior Amos Sauer said that in light of the Cornell case, SWEAR has further emphasized the importance of being an “active bystander” during incidents of sexual assault. For Sauer, being an active bystander is about intervening to prevent incidents of sexual violence.

“For me, [active bystanding] is if I see something, say something. That to never look the other way, even if I suspect the slightest bit of someone being forced to do something they don’t want to do,” Sauer said. 

Senior Henry Hall expressed his astonishment that so many people chose not to intervene during the alleged assault. 

“It’s mindblowing … how it could have possibly happened that so many people just decided to look the other way,” Hall said. “We should talk about it and have the uncomfortable conversations.”

MVRHS Principal Bryan Lombardi expressed his pride for the participating students. 

“[I’m] very proud of the students [for] exercising their rights to freedom of speech but more importantly rising up to a very important cause and something we should be aware of,” Lombardi said. 

Over on Cornell’s campus, Islander and junior Olympia Hall serves as the co-president of the university’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Safety Club (SAPS). The club didn’t participate in the national day of action and instead opted to organize a tabling event to distribute purple ribbons in observance of Domestic Violence Awareness Month last Monday. Hall, who graduated from MVRHS in 2024, told The Times that walkouts like the one at MVRHS are a positive outcome from the case’s media attention.    

“It’s putting this problem into a wider conversation across the nation,” Hall said. “The more people that talk about it, the more people will be held accountable.”

Hall also emphasized, however, that the presence of so many media outlets on campus in the past couple weeks has made many students feel uncomfortable.

“You’re walking to class, and there are newspeople that are having interviews … I think a lot of students are feeling upset and scared by all the news because I think mass media tends to shape stories in a particular way, and so kids are scared to say anything to these news reporters,” Hall said. “A lot of people really love Cornell and we’ve been getting a lot of hate online … sexual assault is a wider national problem, and so I think a lot of people on campus are feeling that we’re getting the heat for something that maybe isn’t just us.”