Feminism encompasses a wide array of theory, approaches, disciplines, and practices that purposefully center gender as the starting point of critical analysis for understanding gendered oppression. This analysis informs a grounded approach to dismantling systemic barriers that impact all people from living freely.  At SAFE Center, our work is focused on the dismantlement of rape culture, which is an integral component of gendered systems in the United States. Our educational efforts seek to challenge and deconstruct gender and power-based violence, growing a life-giving culture of consent and creating a campus (and world) where all people thrive. 

At SAFE Center, our Feminist Education framework is based on the following principles:

• Empowerment: Students are encouraged to be active participants in their learning and praxis development. 
• Community building: Students work together to create a supportive and welcoming learning environment.
• Respect for difference: Students’ unique personal identities, experiences, and perspectives are valued.
• Challenging traditional assumptions: Students are invited to engage and push back on the status quo. 
• Intersectionality: Students consider how their unique social location in social categorization systems including class, race, ability, sexuality, religion, national origins/status, and others inform their lived experience and their relationships with others. 

Why Feminist Education?

Simply put, Prevention Education is Feminist Education.

Prevention education refers to comprehensive education that is focused on addressing the root causes of power-based violence, gender-based violence, interpersonal violence, sexual assault, relationship violence, and stalking. Prevention strategies address the ways individual relationships, communities, and societal factors influence the occurrence of harm impact and aim to prevent violence before it occurs.

There are many approaches to prevention education and while many organizations take up a Public Health model, SAFE Center is sensitive to the ways that the medical model historically and currently individualizes, pathologizes, and depoliticizes the impacts of sexual violence. We instead employ trauma informed Feminist programming, often incorporating elements of Transformative Justice and Healing Justice, to ensure our educational efforts are survivor centered and serve the purposes of community healing.