Silence fought bullying in schools and everywhere on Friday at the “Day of Silence” demonstration at Florida Atlantic University.
The LGBTQA Resource Center — a center for FAU students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, or their ally — and Lambda United, a cultural club at FAU that supports LGBTQA students, organized a Day of Silence from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Traditions Plaza to promote awareness and demonstrate opposition to bullying.
Members of the group participated in activities and spoke to people who did not know what was going on. One activity involved writing down hurtful actions or words and pinning the statement to the “Hate Wall.” The wall opposite this wall was called the “Ways to Stop Bullying Wall” which contained written tips on how to stop bullying.
“The hate wall will be ‘destroyed’ at the end of the event symbolizing our fight against bullying and leaving those awful experiences in the past,” President of Lambda United Daniela Feriozzi said.
According to the vice president of Lambda United (LU), Rory Padgett, The Day of Silence is a national event originated from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a New York based organization that fights LGBT issues in education.
The GLSEN website explained that “thousands of students across the country will participate in Day of Silence to highlight the effects of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools.”
According to Feriozzi, large, diverse groups of people came to the demonstration, a couple of them with duct-taped mouths to show their silence. The group of demonstrators held signs and passed out stickers explaining the reasons to be silent.
According to FAU’s anti-discrimination policy, sexual orientation is protected but gender identity is not protected by FAU. Out of the 12 Florida public universities, FAU, Florida Gulf Coast University, and FAMU are the only three universities that do not include “gender identity” in their anti-discrimination policy.
In 2011, the UP reported that the Board of Trustees at FAU — the 13 highest-ranking officials who make policy decisions — voted to add sexual orientation to the anti-discrimination policy but did not add gender identity, which means that individuals who identify themselves as transgender, either gender, or neither gender are not protected by FAU’s policy.
Feriozzi gave an example of how this could possibly hurt students at FAU.
She said that since gender identity is not included in FAU’s policy, if an FAU student is the victim of a hate crime because of their gender identity, the police can do something about it only because it is a hate crime — not because it is an act of discrimination against the student’s gender identity.
“We all have a gender. We all have a gender expression,” she said.
Feriozzi said she hoped this act of silence would not only bring awareness to FAU, but would also speak for those who were silenced in the past.
“We’ll be projecting the voices of those who have been silenced, and shouldn’t have been,” she wrote in an email.
Padgett, who was unable to attend the demonstration, had mixed feelings on the effectiveness of the silence, but said that Lambda United consisted of both members that are against staying silent and members that support silence, keeping the club balanced.
“But I feel that remaining silent only allows for the conditions of silence to be further perpetuated,” he said.
By the end of the “Day of Silence” demonstration, Feriozzi said that the “Stop Bullying Wall” was filled with overlapping sheets of paper and the “Hate Wall” was ripped apart to show that those experiences were in the past.
“We hope to bring some awareness to the FAU community when it comes to bullying and how it can be stopped,” Feriozzi wrote in an email, “not only when it is against the [LGBTQA] community, but everyone.”
