Join NevadaCARES in honoring Denim Day (4/29)

Posted by: Daniel Fred

We hope you all are doing well and staying healthy!

As many of you know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). Jamie and the CASAT Training team has been doing an incredible job of sharing information about SAAM through social media, and Stephanie created an awesome post about SAAM for CASAT OnDemand. We wanted to take a second and say thank you for spreading awareness and for supporting our efforts this month!

For one of our campaigns, we could use your help! One of the campaigns that we always take part in during SAAM is Denim Day, which is April 29th (this upcoming Wednesday). Since we can’t be on campus, we’ve been doing all of our campaigns and events through social media, mainly instagram. Essentially, we are asking that if you own anything denim, or have family members that do, that you can take a picture of yourself and/or your family wearing it, and share it with us so that we can gather pictures for our social media campaign in solidarity with survivors. If you prefer not to be in pictures, feel free to get creative with how you are displaying denim without you or your family being seen.

We’re hoping to post these pictures on our social media throughout the day this Wednesday, April 29th. For those of you that are interested in helping, you can either post the picture to your own personal instagram account, and tag @nvcares for us to be able to reshare the picture, or you can email it to us at nvcares@casat.org. Either way is totally fine by us!

If you want more information and the history around Denim Day, one of our PACKtivist put together a lovely description of Denim Day, and what we hope to do.

Thank you to anyone who is interested in helping us out! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Kindest Regards,
NevadaCARES Team

Read what our wondeful PACKtivist, Faith wrote below:
April 29, 2020 is Denim Day and marks the end of Sexual Assault Awareness month. Denim Day is a global movement in which people are encouraged to wear jeans to raise awareness of rape and sexual assault. For the past 21 years, Peace Over Violence has run an inspiring and powerful opportunity to practice solidarity and support survivors by renewing our commitment to exposing harmful behaviors and attitudes surrounding sexual violence. Denim Day is a campaign on a Wednesday in April in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The campaign began after a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court where a rape conviction was overturned because the justices felt that since the victim was wearing tight jeans she must have helped the person who raped her remove her jeans, thereby implying consent. The following day, the women in the Italian Parliament came to work wearing jeans in solidarity with the victim. Peace Over Violence developed the Denim Day campaign in response to this case and the activism surrounding it. Since then, what started as a local campaign to bring awareness to victim blaming and destructive myths that surround sexual violence has grown into a movement. As the longest running sexual violence prevention and education campaign in history, Denim Day asks community members, elected officials, businesses and students to make a social statement with their fashion statement by wearing jeans on this day as a visible means of protest against the misconceptions that surround sexual violence. Many dress head to toe in denim but any type of denim (jeans, jacket, really anything) if perfect. This year being in quarantine, the large gatherings in public and events on campuses around the world have been cancelled. I want to make sure this day does not go silent this year simply because we cannot gather physically. What I am asking is for a picture of you wearing denim of any kind, as much or as little as you please, in support of survivors and awareness. If you want to participate you will be included in posts about Denim Day 2020 by myself and possibly advocate clubs on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. This is a personal social media project of mine but I would love it if anyone could also make their own post or speak out about their experiences. We have all been effected somehow by the violence and stigma behind sexual assault and rape culture. Thank you for your interest. ❤
-Faith Zinn