Interview with Kenyora Lenair Parham, Executive Director of End Rape On Campus, an organisation working to end campus sexual violence through support, education and policy reform, centring historically excluded and systemically marginalised student survivors.
Location: Washington D.C., USA
Kenyora Lenair Parham is an inspiring leader in sexual violence prevention and care for victim-survivors. We connected a few years ago during COVID through our involvement in Students Rise International - a collective of anti-sexual violence activists from across the world. She is the Executive Director of End Rape On Campus (EROC). It was exciting to meet in person at the Civic Nation office in DC (the former parent company EROC joined in 2020). Civic Nation brings together nonprofits with grassroots origins to create an ecosystem for high-impact organising and education initiatives to create a more equitable America. Civic Nation played an important role in assisting EROC to scale up and increase their impact across the country.
Centering the Margins
One of the key initiatives Parham has led with EROC is their 'Centering the Margins' framework (CTM). This is a framework that focuses on and centres historically underserved and marginalised student victim-survivors in the campus anti-rape movement, and attends to the particular needs of those victim-survivors. This came about as Parham wanted to be explicit in amplifying the voices and experiences of victim-survivors who are often ignored and silenced. Under the CTM framework, the victim-survivors they have worked with and provided services to include, but are not limited to:
Historically black colleges and universities
Survivors of colour
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Queer Communities
Transgender, gender nonconforming and nonbinary
Male survivors
Low income survivors
Survivors with disabilities
Undocumented and international student survivors.
Parham also works hard to collaborate across the sector and work with other groups to build a collective of care for victim-survivors and to have greater impact. Some of their partners include It's On Us and the Every Voice Coalition.
They also engage students across the country in their Student Survivor Caucus and Speaker Series (both elements of their Centering the Margins framework). Parham's goal is to bring students closer to the power and bring students together to provide peer-to-peer support. Since starting this, the initiative has engaged more than 50 students from 42 different universities across the country.
Parham also spoke about EROC's work with community colleges, as these schools are often excluded from tertiary education initiatives on sexual violence prevention and victim-survivor support. This is similar to the Australian system in how TAFE institutions tend to be excluded from advocacy and reforms around sexual violence in education.
Accountability Mapping
Another core project of EROC is their Campus Accountability Map and Tool, which allows students and their communities to compare prevalence statistics, student safety policies and the support services offered on their campus. EROC had more than 150 volunteers to crowdsource and factcheck all of the data.
Parham became the Executive Director in 2019. Since then she has focused on shifting the narrative to support victim-survivors and communities that need it most. Over the next few years, Parham is committed to incorporating healing for students while also focusing on mobilisation so these students can look after themselves.
“I need more students to know that they are valued in this space and at the end of the day they are college students so should be experiencing ‘college’. They should be on a journey that is violence free, or if they have already experienced violence to have the tools to navigate through it and a community to help them along the way.”
Activating Alumni to Action
I asked Parham for advice on how student-led groups like The STOP Campaign can be taken seriously by universities while also continuing to advocate for change. She spoke about drawing on the power of alumni as well as institution leaders and student leaders who are willing to provide support. Parham's response was really affirming as to my involvement in the movement against sexual violence on campus at the ANU (where I studied my undergraduate degree) as alumni. She said that the USA has seen alumni of institutions come together and push for student activist groups to be listened to by their institutions. This strikes me as unique to the USA - I have personally been told by many friends and community members in Australia that I need to 'move on', 'get over it', 'realise I'm not a student anymore' and that 'campus sexual assault isn't my problem'. The problem with this is that people seem to care about social issues, such as sexual violence, when it directly affects them, and then not care at all once they have graduated and moved on. As alumni of institutions, we should care about the students who come after us. We should continue to advocate for change and support students to keep up the movement against sexual violence on campus. We should care.
We don't want any other student to experience any form of violence or harm when they seek an education. We all need to take responsibility and do our part to hold institutions accountable for taking this issue seriously and meeting student demands.
For anyone reading this who is an alumni of a university in Australia, have you thought about coming together to do something about the atrocities happening on campus today? I think it's time we followed in the footsteps of alumni in the USA who have banded together to support current students and do the same.
In solidarity,
Camille Schloeffel
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