In response to racially motivated attacks on several college campuses across the United States, Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) announced a revamped Safe Walk program to ensure students do not have to walk alone. BSG President Harriet Fisher ’17 informed students of the program in an email on Saturday.
As part of the program, students can sign up to help others, or confidentially request accompaniment and receive contact information of students who have signed up to help.
“There’s one form where you can offer up your time, put in your name, your phone number, your email, what your commute is to campus and what times of day you would be available,” Fisher said. “On the other form, all you have to submit is your email. As soon as I see a request for that, I automatically share that email with all the contact information.”
As of press time, nine students have requested assistance and 74 students have offered their help.
Bowdoin Safe Walk first formed as a Facebook group last fall, after several sexual assaults were reported including an incident in which multiple female students were groped while walking at night.
Fisher said that this year’s Safe Walk system builds off of the momentum of last year’s program, but said that it had a different goal in light of incidents at other colleges following the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States.
At the University of Michigan, a Muslim student was approached by a man who threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. A number of African American first-year students at the University of Pennsylvania were added to a GroupMe conversation that threatened a “daily lynching” and made other racist remarks, the Washington Post reported.
“[The Safe Walk program] is in light of the election results. I don’t see it as kind of the same thing [as last year], because I think it serves a new purpose,” said Fisher.