Under normal circumstances, April 1 is a day I look forward to.
Since I’m the self-designated practical joker in the family, April Fools Day is usually a fun day for me. If you remember the MTV show “Punk’d” where Ashton Kutcher would play practical jokes on people, that’s the kind of hijinks that make up a normal April Fools Day for me.
One of my favorite pranks was the day I called my dad out of the blue and told him I’d been asked to take over a job as a beat writer for an NBA team. Going from a small-town Nebraska daily newspaper to the big NBA metropolis was such a shocking bit of news, and he fell for it all — even the part about the newspaper owning its own golf course and private school.
This April 1, however, there is a different vibe surrounding the day for me.
The month of April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a great opportunity to spread the message on sexual assault and helping those who have been through the experience. Rather than trying to see if I can fool somebody with a good practical joke, I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to speak out about my experience as a survivor and, hopefully, help those who have been through the experience find their voice as well.
I was hoping to do a month-long tour of speaking engagements, but more time and planning needed to go into a venture of that magnitude. Still, I’ve been able to line up a few speaking engagements for the month, and I’m working to get in print, on the radio and even on TV to raise awareness of sexual assault and the impact it has, especially on the lives of our young people.
I’ve been getting ready for my first big speech, which comes up later this week, and I’ve been going back and re-reading some of the initial information that I found as I began speaking publicly about my experience — and that information continues to blow my mind when I think of how many children in this country are dealing with the trauma of being a victim of sexual assault.
Here in Nebraska, if we took the Centers For Disease Control study that found 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys would experience a sexual assault before their 18th birthdays and applied it to the current statewide K-12 enrollment in our school systems, we’d have enough kids to fill up three-fourths of Memorial Stadium — that’s more than 70,000 school-age children.
I’ll be busy during the next month, working on speeches and talking about sexual assault during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Look for more entries and information here in the days ahead.