New UNI center to spearhead statewide violence prevention efforts

The University of Northern Iowa focused on its initiatives in responding to and preventing violence with the official opening of its Center for Violence Prevention Friday.

The center, which is the culmination of more than a decade of work done in conjunction with Public Safety, Student Affairs and faculty members at UNI, attempts to stop violence by revising policies and training faculty, staff, students and community members to become leaders in identifying and preventing violence of all varieties.

"The opening of this center presents this university and through it many other universities … the opportunity to impact the lives of students, faculty, staff and the people of Iowa and even students in other states, and as an end result, what we need so much in this country – and how we have forgotten this I don't know – but we have to promote more civility among all of us," U.S. Senator and UNI alumnus Chuck Grassley said during the celebration.

"By focusing on violence on college campuses, this center will focus on best practices for responding to and, most importantly, preventing violence," he continued. "This is a noble mission and a timely one. The center will provide leadership in developing solutions to campus violence and research ways to stop tragic events from ever occurring."

Grassley feels this center comes at a very solemn time in our country after the recent public shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in which six were killed and many others were injured.

"Americans should expect safety when assembling publicly, whether it's exercising civic interest or even learning in the classroom," he said. "A tragedy like Arizona encourages us all to redouble our efforts to prevent violence."

According to Annette Lynch, a UNI professor and the director of the new center, the work leading up to the opening of this center began with grants written in 2000. Since that time, she has expanded work onto all three Regents campuses, at which these initiatives spawned informative theatre groups like UNI's SAVE Forum Actors and revised sexual misconduct policies on all three campuses "so we're more responsive and more effective when a victim reports," Lynch said.

The center provides a victim service institute on a roughly annual basis at which it trains campus police, victim advocates and all points of first contact for students in Student Affairs, such as resident assistants and residence life coordinators.

"We also are very involved in engaging men in the issue and have created training programs where male students can go through a certification process where they learn how to be better bystanders, be leaders within their peer groups," Lynch said.

Lynch feels these training programs are very important, because she feels violence prevention is more effective when it's coming from peers.

"If you've got a friend that's trying to get a girl drunk at a party because they're hoping that she'll go home with them, you need to intervene and say, ‘That's not a good idea,' ‘Maybe you should call her back when she's sober and ask her for a date,'" Lynch said. "You want that to happen within the peer group, not because someone on the outside is telling them to do that."

The center will also focus on working with teacher education curricula and sending coaches and teachers into public schools prepared to deal with bullying and disrespectful students on a daily basis.

"We want people to have violence prevention skills that they carry into all the communities where they get jobs throughout the state of Iowa," Lynch said.

For more information on the program, if you would like to get involved in a training program or if you are a victim of violence, visit www.uni.edu/cvp.