Many skills are attained from attending university, from social intricacies to mathematics, critical analysis to flying an airplane, but an area that is often inadequately taught is competency in the recognition and response to violence. While these topics can be difficult to breach and engage with, they are important to acknowledge, as violence is unfortunately a common occurrence, especially on university campuses. Fortunately, the Community Violence Intervention Center is on UND’s campus to make this task easier by providing various workshops and presentations for students, staff and faculty.
CVIC’s main goal is the advocacy of safety and support on campus through the education and prevention of violence. This is done in many ways, but one of which is the offered workshops and presentations that cover topics ranging from consent, boundaries, healthy relationships, violence impact & prevention, and bystander intervention. These different options are outlined in an easy to comprehend “menu” where the main points, objectives, and trigger warnings are given, making it even easier to facilitate this education. This can be found on UND’s website by searching for CVIC, finding “CVIC at UND,” and looking under “Prevention and Education Services.”
Each workshop has its own benefits, and there are many to choose from, but some in particular stand out as especially relevant. The first, titled “Escalation: Based on a True Story.” covers escalation in relationships and how warning signs can be hard to spot, shifting from healthy to unhealthy quickly. Red flags are easier to spot when they are glaring and viewed from a third-party perspective, but most do not happen in this way, and it can become easy to fall into a slippery slope in relationships. This workshop exists to help individuals avoid that outcome. Another emphasizing healthy relationships is “Behind the Post,” which explores the ways in which technology and social media can have an impact on the healthiness of a relationship. Technology is everywhere, and its presence can inadvertently create more ways in which unhealthy behaviors can slip through.
In a similar vein as the prior workshops, “Consent 2.0: Beyond Yes or No” goes into detail on what constitutes consent and how communication surrounding it can be improved. Not every workshop is focused on someone’s own relationships, though. “Who Are You in a Crisis?” goes into valuable ways to show support and respond when someone around you has experienced some form of violence, better preparing people for difficult conversations. Hopefully no such conversations will have to happen; but just in case, having these tools can make all the difference. There are many more outside of the ones mentioned and if one seems to be missing, CVIC is also open to collaborating to make a custom workshop for whatever the need may be.
While universities have a responsibility to prepare young people for the professional world, they also have a duty to ensure safety while doing so. It can be hard to implement education surrounding these topics with everything else there is to prepare for each semester, but utilizing CVIC and their workshops is not. It can be as easy as an email, and that simple email could be what helps secure someone’s safety and wellbeing.
Ed Tortorelli is a Dakota Student General Reporter. He can be reached at [email protected].
