Ribbons for Everyone

The Coalition Against Sexual Violence and the Radcliffe Union of Students, with the express support of more than a dozen other campus organizations, have been handing out cards on campus with purple ribbons as women’s groups and others participate in Take Back the Night activities this week. Although this movement initially sought to make the streets safe for women to walk alone at night, now—at Harvard anyway—it means “raising awareness about sexual violence and other women’s issues.” The cards being handed out implore, “Wear a purple ribbon to show your support for survivors of sexual violence.”

The wearing of ribbons to express compassion for victims was popularized with yellow military ribbons, but ribbons became a common symbol with the AIDS Awareness Ribbons campaign. According to Visual AIDS, the advocacy group that began the campaign in 1991, the ribbons were intended to represent compassion for victims, but became a symbol of awareness. AIDS and sexual violence are widely misunderstood problems, and their victims both deserve compassion—but ribbon-wearing itself does nothing to actually increase knowledge and is not a sincere or significant means of expressing emotion.

Although a survivor might take comfort in a room full of people displaying ribbons, the minimal effort required in wearing one makes its statement hollow, and the lack of meaning has only been exacerbated by the omnipresence of AIDS and breast cancer and a rainbow of other ribbons in the past decade.

The campaign shows how easily the term “raise awareness” can become a euphemism for “advertise.” Ribbons should be a way to express a sincere dedication to an issue, not just a more profound way of advertising than posters or fliers, which we so often discard or ignore.

Not wearing a ribbon on campus might erroneously suggest that one does not support the survivors of sexual violence. But if one chooses to wear a ribbon, is it for the right reasons? A friend who had been working at a table outside the Science Center stepped into Annenberg earlier this week and walked past my table. Someone else pointed out that she was wearing two of the purple emblems, one on her shirt and one on her backpack. “Yeah,” she said, “I kept walking past them. I felt guilty.”

Of course, no decent person has any tolerance for sexual violence. One should not sympathize with victims out of pity or guilt, but out of a sense of moral obligation. Sometimes we need to be persuaded to overcome our apathy, which requires a legitimate investment of thought and feeling.

It is ironic that promoters of the City-Step charity show, advertising their event in front of the Science Center just feet away from representatives of Take Back the Night, were bouncing to the song “What’s Your Fantasy.” In the song lyrics, Ludacris describes violent (but consensual) intercourse—he wants to meet his sex interest’s fantasies, which apparently involve “rough sex” on the 50-yard line of a football stadium and in the White House. CityStep obviously does not support this image of sexual relations, but the song represents an attitude I think those organizing Take Back the Night would want to challenge—that men assume women’s fantasies involve violent sex, the old myth that men think women want to be overpowered.

There are far more victims of sexual violence than the average flier-reader is aware of. It is vital to both combat the attitudes that lead to sexual violence and create a supportive environment in which survivors can freely express their emotions about what happened to them. But the purple ribbons are essentially meaningless. It would not hurt anyone to wear the ribbon, but what would it accomplish beyond a momentary acknowledgement of a serious societal problem?

Due to their ubiquity, ribbons are being used more as an advertisement for the week’s activities than actually as a symbol of committed sympathy and awareness—and the issue at hand is too serious to cheapen with empty symbols of effortless advocacy. Ribbons should be earned. If distributed at all, they should be at the group’s events, where audience members, by virtue of showing up, have shown that they appreciate the feeling that is behind it. And after the survivors have spoken and shared their pent-up emotions, and after we, the flier-tossers, have listened, maybe then the ribbons will mean something.

David B. Rochelson ’05 lives in Weld Hall.