By Anna Freyberg Oertel

When the University of Minnesota abruptly closed the Sexual Violence Program’s peer counseling service in 1989, students and staff sprang into action.

“We were the program, and it was ours to fight for,” said Stacy Sorenson, one of the many dedicated students who campaigned to preserve the program.

This little known movement animated my archival and oral history research as a graduate student in the Heritage Studies and Public History program. For my master’s capstone, I conducted an oral history project with former University students and staff involved in this anti-sexual assault campaign. The interview recordings and transcripts are available online via the University Digital Conservancy.

These activists’ efforts successfully reinstated crucial survivor services and pressured University leadership to address the broader culture of violence against women. Today, the Sexual Violence Program lives on as the Aurora Center for Advocacy and Education.

Creating a Grassroots Campaign

The Restore the Sexual Violence Program (RSVP) campaign was a student-led movement to reverse the 1989 closure of the Sexual Violence Program’s (SVP) peer counseling service. But the campaign was more ambitious than its title suggested.

Activists aimed to raise awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault, criticize the University of Minnesota Police Department’s (UMPD) ineffective handling of sexual misconduct, and advocate for expanded prevention efforts on campus.

“I think we felt a strong obligation to the movement,” said Sorenson, a former SVP peer counselor. “You know, our political awareness had been growing, and then just to be told to shut it down and this wasn’t important anymore, felt just profoundly wrong.”

I was drawn to this moment for several reasons. Firstly, it was a coalitional anti-rape movement that wasn’t tied to advocacy around a specific case of sexual assault, as was often the case. Instead, RSVP emphasized the importance of support services and prevention education broadly as essential to ending sexual violence on campus.

Secondly, the activists drew attention to violence against women and yet were met with violence by UMPD officers who arrested high numbers of students during protests. And finally, the RSVP campaign was successful by almost every measure, the most celebrated impact being the restoration of the program’s peer counseling service in 1990.

This movement was also primarily led by women and queer students who advocated for greater education around sexual violence as a systemic tool of oppression, that often intersected with racism and homophobia.

Cherrene Horazuk, an activist and Women’s Studies major, remembered her experience of being arrested during the students’ organized sit-in outside President Nils Hasselmo’s office in Morrill Hall in February 1990. In her interview, Horazuk described the abuse by UMPD officers, who harassed and groped female students during their arrests.

“When the police were called and came in and interacted with us, it was outrageous,” she said. “We expected to get arrested, we didn’t expect to get assaulted. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat to keep the Sexual Violence Program running, and I think most of the people who participated would agree.”

Through archival research and oral history interviews, I sought to measure the long-term policy impact of student activism and to document cases of excessive force being employed against students.

Understanding RSVP through the Archives

My research for this project began in the University Archives in Andersen Library. The most relevant archival materials were held in institutional files – Office of the President, Vice President for Student Affairs, and Police Department.

Official University documents did not reference or recognize the RSVP campaign, except through veiled language, demonstrating administrators’ unwillingness to explicitly link their actions to student demands. As such, archives often become sites of obscurity.

I did, however, find a small trove of petitions, letters, and articles relating to the RSVP campaign that had been collected and preserved by students in University government organizations who supported the RSVP cause. These students used the legitimacy of their positions as a foothold into the institutional record and helped ensure that their efforts weren’t erased.

These materials provided insight into the students’ arguments, campaign strategies, and how they responded to the contentious debate surrounding the role of peer support for victim-survivors. Several RSVP demands – for example, the inclusion of a mandate against sexual violence in the student code of conduct and publication of sexual violence statistics – would later materialize in state or federal laws governing public universities, illustrating the activists’ foresight.

Why Oral History?

After the archive appointments, I was still left with burning questions about the motivations and experiences of individual students. Who were they? What factors drove their involvement in anti-sexual assault advocacy? What visions did they have for the future of the Sexual Violence Program or how the University should be accountable to victim-survivors of campus violence?

To answer these questions, I turned to oral history methodology. Recording and archiving oral stories is a practice used by feminist scholars and public historians, which stems from Black and Indigenous folk traditions. Oral history allows researchers and storytellers to fill gaps in traditional archives that often do not capture the lives of women and marginalized people, and takes care to ensure narrators have shared authority over their interviews.

For this phase of my project, I spent time reaching out and talking with former University students and staff who were directly involved with the RSVP campaign. The interviews we recorded were unscripted and conversational, focusing on narrator’s experiences of girlhood and understandings of sexual violence, as well as their memories of the RSVP movement.

An additional goal of the oral history project was to build a bridge between past and present SVP/Aurora Center staff and volunteers. The Aurora Center will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year, making this an opportune time to commemorate the women who fought to sustain its invaluable services.

Listening to History

The oral histories in this collection reveal students’ deep commitments to ensuring that survivor services and prevention education were adequately funded and available across University of Minnesota campuses.

Listening to their stories, I learned more than I ever could have gleaned through archival research alone. The narrators shared with me their stories of finding community and belonging through their activism and navigating their queer identities. Getting to know these women and reflect on their difficult, messy, and joyful experiences alongside them is a privilege I do not take for granted.

“This was not your typical group of protesters as it were. You know, this was just a group of female students that had had enough and knew they weren’t being listened to,” said Activist siobhan kane. “People were not going to budge. We were going to push it as far as we could.”