The VAV Peer Group was born out of student volunteership with VAV programs.
Eventually there were enough students volunteering to make a separate ogranization.
While the Peer Group works under the umbrella of VAV, they work at times as
their own functioning group.
My greatest challenges in this movement are my gender and age. Being a male in an almost women's only movement creates many obvious hurdles, but also gives me a great perspective many don't have. When dealing with issues such as sexual assault, rape, and dating violence, it's tough to establish your credibility, especially when you work with licensed social workers and psychologists. Even though age makes this hard, the faculty and staff on the VAV really respect what the peers do.
Unfortunantly not many organiztions such as ours exists. What I've found is
the leadership styles that exist in the organization are a compilation of styles
from different groups. I bring to the table my experience with peer education
working through the summer orientation program, while others bring Safe Place
training. Since so many people in the peer group are key leaders in other clubs,
those types of leadership styles are brought to the table also.
Education, education, education. The amount of people that show up, or the crowd's response are never really the most important. But if we leave the event having left people thinking about issues, and they in turn are couragous enough to speak to others, then we have made all the difference that we can. In my mind, this is a success. While this may seem hard to gauge, it is fairly simple. When doing peer education, we measure how "into" a presentation our audience is. For example, we remember how many questions they asked and how interested they seemed. When working with incoming freshmen, we find they ask little to no questions and almost feel forced to be educated. When working with sororities or other populations of non-freshmen, we find they ask many more questions, know the answer to many more questions, and overall seem more in tune with the issues. This shows there is some form of self education (talking with others, finding more information, etc.) happening with these groups. This is beyond successful in my opinion.
In this movement, there seems to be a big divide between "edgy" and "soft" types of presentations of interpersonal violence issues. I would personally like to see more edgy presentations. This would include incorporating computer multimedia, using guerilla theater tactics (having two peer educators improvise a scene as audience members fighting with each other for example), and educating using shocking statistics.
Our greatest challenge is the reluctance to talk about interpersonal violence issues among people of all types. This issues are seen as "taboo" and consequently people don't talk enough about them. In order for our education to be successful we need to over come this.