Rethinking gender in Take Back the Night

Starting at 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 15, in front of Barnard Hall, Columbia students will come together and march around Morningside Heights in order to reclaim our neighborhood as a safe space. We call this event, which is geared toward spreading awareness and ending sexual assault on campus, Take Back the Night. We hold TBTN each year because we believe that our community must stand together in solidarity to end the silence around the violence that affects us all. With the ever-evolving nature of the Take Back the Night March and the movement against sexual assault, the active members of the organization felt it necessary to explain both old and new features of this year’s march.

For the past two years, TBTN members maintained a women’s space at the front of the march, which was followed by a large gender-neutral section. The women’s space was created to ensure that female survivors, co-survivors, and allies could take part in the march without feeling afraid, intimidated, or triggered in a co-gendered environment. This year, we spent weeks discussing whether or not to maintain the women’s space—we wondered if the anti-sexual violence movement reached a point in which we could comfortably create an entirely gender-neutral march.
We acknowledge that a person can be sexually assaulted by another person regardless of gender and that transgendered individuals are often victims and survivors as well. In thinking about these realities, we considered the potential hypocrisy of creating a women’s only space and the impact that it could have on, for example, male or genderqueer survivors of assault.

And so we began to explore alternatives to our current model. We briefly discussed creating both a women’s only space and a men’s only space, but quickly decided against that option for fear of reinforcing a gender binary and further alienating any transgendered survivors. Since the statistics reveal that the majority of male survivors are assaulted by other men, such a space could potentially be more traumatic than supportive. Additionally, we strongly considered creating, for the first time, an entirely gender-neutral march. We wondered if this option could be the best way to allow all survivors to march without feelings of alienation or intimidation.

However, we ultimately decided against the gender-neutral model for several reasons. First and foremost, our primary concern was for the emotional safety of female survivors. We are aware that many female survivors on campus will not participate in the march unless we give them the option to march in a women’s space. Because the march is an opportunity for survivors to empower themselves in our community, we could not deny them this space. Second, since the march is open to all members of the community, we have no way of knowing who actually participates—nothing bars perpetrators from marching (perhaps except for their own moral consciences). Finally, we recognize that sexual assault is still a gendered crime: In the majority of reported cases, men assault women. We must recognize this reality in order to discuss how to stop the cycle of violence.

At the same time, we want this event to be inclusive and comfortable for all those who would like to participate. We want to make it clear that all individuals who identify as women on a daily basis are welcome to participate in the female-led portion of the march. Additionally, we have introduced a new initiative for this year’s march: Although we are keeping the women’s only space intact, which will be patrolled by female student volunteer marshals, we are inviting any interested allies, regardless of gender identity, to volunteer as marshals for the gender-neutral portion of the march. We hope that this new feature of the march, in addition to the gender-neutral space itself, will demonstrate the importance of fighting sexual violence across gender boundaries. We hope to convey that we are not trying to minimize the experiences of any survivor, co-survivor, or ally who cannot march in the women’s only space.

The Take Back the Night March itself has come a long way over the course of its twenty-two years at Barnard and Columbia. For the majority of those years, the march was only open to women. We are constantly thinking about ways to improve the march, but change is a long process that requires serious discussion and consideration. We will continue to think about ways to make the march as successful as possible in years to come.

Maddie Friedman is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in history. She is an active member of TBTN and Co-Head Marshal. Lauren Herold is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in anthropology. She is a Co-Coordinator of TBTN.