Liamarie Quinde, '16, member of One Less; video interview

Niki Afsar and Tierney Vial

Take Back the Archive

Academic year 2014-2015

Video, 15:48 minutes

Liamarie Quinde, UVA ’16
Member, One Less, an all-female sexual assault education group that advocates for survivors
Interviewed spring 2015 by Tierney Vial and Niki Afsar, research assistants for Take Back the Archive

0:24 How has sexual assault advocacy changed during your time at UVa?
“I have no memory of anyone talking about it at all when I came here as a first-year.”
Green Dot intervention program shows “90% of the battle is stepping in before anything happens, and you can give everyone the tools to do that.”

2:31 How have responses to sexual assault changed within the UVa community?
“People weren’t talking about” sexual assault before the Rolling Stone article, but they are now. “Before, you might have been viewed as the loud angry feminist, and people weren’t listening.”

5:15 What advice do you have for students who want to get involved in sexual assault advocacy?
“We need to work on survivor support” as well as bystander prevention.

6:25 What is a high priority area for improvement in UVa’s response to sexual assault?
“We really need to focus on the sexual misconduct policy. What we do at the university “needs to be paired with the criminal justice system outside the university.”

9:15 Can you talk about student reactions to the events of the 2014-2015 school year?
“The hardest thing for me was leaving school and going home for Thanksgiving break, and having these discussions with family members getting the story through the media.”

13:15 What specific frustrations have advocacy groups felt towards the UVA administration?
Students from the “traditional organizations” like Honor and UJC (University Judiciary Committee) and Student Council “have much more access to specific administrators than others” do. Members of One Less and the Inter-Sorority Council (ISC) “didn’t feel welcomed into the conversation going on, particularly with the President at the time, about what we were going to do about Greek life.”