What’s better than a date auction? A date auction raising awareness for sexual assault while donating money to a good cause.
Last week, Sigma Phi Epsilon held their Sexual Assault Awareness Week. For their Wednesday night event, Snag a SigEp, the young men showcased some of their talents and were auctioned off to raise money for the Cedar Valley Friends of the Family.
“I see sexual assault as a growing issue on college campuses, whether it’s student athletes, fraternities, I mean those are two of the big groups that get accused or are in the papers for this, and our fraternity has that motto of wanting to be the difference,” said Ryan Biegger, junior accounting major and fraternity member of SigEp.
Before the talent showcase kicked off, a speaker from the Center of Violence Prevention spoke about the different options people on campus have to learn about sexual assault.
“I think it’s just a really good chance to raise awareness for sexual assault awareness, but also, just again, to see the talent that’s displayed here. I think it’s just cool to see people do things that we don’t even realize behind the scenes,” said Molly Norman, junior communication studies major.
Norman, one of the emcees of the night, engaged in an impromptu rendition of High School Musical’s “Breaking Free” with her fellow host.
The night was filled with various talents including: lip sync battles, dance numbers, grilled cheese making, magic tricks and a musical set by the local band Nova Scotia. Following acts, the performers would come back on stage to get auctioned off to the highest bidder. The highest single bid for one of the acts was $530. For Biegger, the goal for the week was to spread sexual assault awareness through social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
“My goal was to raise awareness and I think that was by Twitter and Facebook, getting people to know what we’re doing, coming to a lot of our events,” Biegger said.
Biegger hoped that students would be “more aware, active bystanders, you could say, help[ing] [to] prevent this from happening in the future.”
Alexandra Sweeney, junior graphic design major, was at the event to support the Greek community, being in a sorority herself. Through SigEp’s SAAW events, Sweeney was made aware of how common sexual assault occurs.
“Sexual assault is a lot bigger than I thought personally, that actually a lot of women are affected by it, and I think it’s great that the men are taking the initiative to do something about it,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney also commented that her sorority was going to spread awareness and educate their members.
“I know in our chapter we are going to make it a bigger part of making sure we really educate the girls on how deal with it and that it’s important that they’re not alone, that there are a lot of people going through it,” Sweeney said.
Aside from the support system that SigEp has reached in the Greek and UNI community, they have been approached by the Courier and been recognized on a national level.
“I know in the first year, it wasn’t a huge pressing need, but I’ve seen more and more articles pop up recently and seeing how this has grown, and I’m just glad a lot of the community has been able to step behind us and help us with a lot of things,” said Biegger. “I think publicity has grown for us this year and shown that we’re actually doing positive things.”
With a majority of the acts fetching bids reaching or surpassing the $100 mark, Biegmann was confident that they could reach their goal of $5,000 for the Cedar Valley Friends of the Family.
“There’s been a lot of negative content in the news lately about fraternities and I think this just shows that fraternities are not bad, that they are actually doing great things,” Sweeney said.
