Students gather at Missouri, UMKC and KU to protest sexual assault on campus

At least 100 protesters showed up at Traditions Plaza at the University of Missouri’s campus Tuesday night to protest sexual assault at the university.

The protest at Missouri was one of several that took place at different university campuses in Kansas and Missouri. About 40 protested at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and about two dozen people showed up at the University of Kansas. A protest was also scheduled at Kansas State.

The protest at Missouri, which was organized by the group Mizzou Without Sexual Assault, had hundreds of students show up with signs, according to pictures on social media.

Protesters chanted “end rape at Mizzou” and “support survivors.”

At the University of Kansas, protesters gathered outside of Strong Hall. It was the fourth protest held at the university since a woman told Lawrence Police last month she’d been raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house during a party. The incident led to hundreds of protesters gathering outside the fraternity house, calling for officials to take action against the fraternity and the alleged perpetrator.

An incident report shared with The Star through a Kansas public records request offers little information outside of confirming that police began looking into the alleged sexual assault.

The protest at Kansas was organized by the group called Strip Your Letters. Grace Reading, 23, one of the founders, said she hoped that the protests Tuesday would put pressure on administrators at different campuses to do more to protect students and support survivors.

“I think there’s a lot of students that would feel and say that student affairs ... they don’t really know what’s going on with their students and they aren’t really in touch and they kind of hole themselves up in their offices,” Reading said. “And that doesn’t get us anywhere, that doesn’t prevent the next survivor from being assaulted.”

Hundreds of students at Kansas have called for the Phi Kappa Psi frat to be removed from campus and have asked the university to do more to protect survivors and eliminate rape culture on campus.

Breanna Standley isn’t a student at Kansas but decided to show up because, “there are a lot of places out there that are unsafe, and it’s something that needs to be made aware of.”

“The more people that say things about it and the more attention that’s brought to it, the better the outcome,” Standley said.

Tuesday’s protests come amid a nationwide wave of outrage among university students over the ongoing issue of sexual assault on college campuses. In Kansas, similar protests were held at Wichita State University and Topeka West High School.

Since the fall semester began, students at nearly 20 colleges across the country have protested against a culture of sexual assault, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, administrators closed the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity from campus after days of protests into an alleged sexual assault, according to the Lincoln Journal Star.

The movement, organizers and experts say, has been fueled by common threads among survivor stories and a return to campus after a year of isolation that saw racial justice protests sweep the nation.

Sexual assault has long been a pervasive issue on college campuses. An Association of American Universities survey conducted in 2019 found that nationwide 25.9% of undergraduate women reported they’d been sexually assaulted during their time in college. KU and Mizzou, which participated in the survey, reported similar numbers.

However, sexual assault is an under-reported crime and it often does not result in a criminal conviction when reported.

The University of Kansas has said it is investigating the rape report at the fraternity house. In the time since those allegations were reported, the KU Public Safety Office arrested a student in a separate rape that allegedly occurred in a dorm.

Anissa Brantley, who is also a co-founder of Strip Your Letters, graduated from the University of Kansas in May but attended Tuesday’s protest. She was very direct in how she feels the school’s administration has handled sexual assault.

“I think the worst part is that they say that they support us and are protecting us when they actually could care less about students’ safety,” she said.